Gamasutra and Red Herring report that Jon Van Caneghem has teamed up with a former Electronic Arts executive (Lars Buttler) to create a new game development and publishing company, Trion World Network. The 20 employee startup, based in Redwood and Austin, is made of former Electronic Arts, NCsoft (where JVC worked on a project recently) and Sony Online employees. It will focus on broadband technology, possibly related to virtual worlds, and deliver content with it. "How video games are developed and distributed today, says Van Caneghem, is a byproduct of old architecture." We will need to wait a while before we get to see what their product look like: "The company is still many months away from giving consumers anything tangible. According to Buttler, the underlying technology itself won’t even be ready until sometime in 2007."

You may remember that JVC had plans for a persistent online game back in the days of 3DO, but the publisher was not strong enough for such a massive project.