Following the collapse of Flagship Studios, a number of the developer's founders and core team formed their own studios. Flagship co-founder and original Blizzard North co-founder and Diablo co-creator Max Schaefer then teamed up with the Flagship Seattle division.

This included FATE designer Travis Baldree and a number of other developers who were behind Flagship's second project, Diablo-esque online RPG Mythos, still in late development at the time of Flagship's closing.

As Korean firm Hanbitsoft has claimed the rights to Mythos, the team branched off to create Runic Games, where through a new deal with major Chinese online game publisher Perfect World, they get a second chance with the concept of a Diablo-like MMO with Torchlight.

"Torchlight is an action RPG, kind of in a similar vein that we were working on previously with the Mythos project," Schaefer tells Gamasutra. "It's evocative of that same style of gameplay; there are a lot of Diablo vets on the team."

While Schaefer clarifies that the art style and mood of Torchlight are completely different from Diablo, he hopes there will be commonalities elsewhere: "We always want you thinking that you've just got to go to one more room and do one more dungeon to find the coolest item -- and hopefully look up and it's three o'clock in the morning," he says.

Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network has promoted veteran Chris Waldron to vice president of gaming operations

Waldron is the executive producer of the company's FusionFall browser-based kids' MMO, and now he adds responsibility for overseeing internal game development, game production, and overall games strategy for Cartoon Network Digital to his slate.

FusionFall currently has more than 4 million registered accounts and focuses on an alien invasion of the Cartoon Network universe.

"Chris continues to be one of the great leaders of our digital team, overseeing the successful launch of our largest and most ambitious game to date - FusionFall," said Paul Condolora, senior vice president, digital for Turner Broadcasting's Animation, Young Adults & Kids Media group.

"I think that our biggest mistake with Flagship was trying to do too much, in every respect," says co-founder Max Schaefer. "We have so many lessons we learned from that."

"If you look at any part of the dev that we had for Hellgate: London, it was trying to do everything, and you can't do everything," Schaefer tells Gamasutra. "We had a single-player version, we had free and [subscriptions online]. And we were making an MMO that was also an FPS that also had a third-person view... it was just too much of everything."

Schaefer, also an original Blizzard North co-founder and a co-creator of Diablo, now has the opportunity to take those lessons and apply them with his new company, Runic Games, where he's joined by FATE designer Travis Baldree and a number of other developers who were behind Flagship's second project, Diablo-esque online RPG Mythos, still in late development at the time of Flagship's closing.

No World of Warcraft license? No problem.

After losing the lucrative license to operate Blizzard's hit MMORPG in mainland China last month to rival NetEase, Chinese online game operator The9 announced World of Fight, an online game that some are already speculating to be a blatant rip-off of WoW.

The9 has launched a website for WoF at www.wofchina.com, only one letter away from the official Chinese WoW site at wowchina.com. Definite similarities can be seen between the logos for WoW and WoF.

Trion World Network says it'll show its first project, a fantasy MMO called Heroes of Telara, at E3 this year.

It's the first naming of an in-house title since the privately-held company -- which boasts more than $100 million in backing -- first unveiled itself in 2006. The company's goal is to offer multiple titles on its broadband platform, the Trion World Network, as individual "channels."

Nexon's MapleStory will celebrate its fourth anniversary in the U.S. on May 11 -- the service has been running for six years globally -- and Nexon America has announced that the game is up to 92 million users worldwide, six million of those in North America.

MapleStory is a free-to-play 2D MMO by South Korean developer Wizet, published in North America, Japan, Korea and some Asian territories by Nexon, by Shanda in China, and by other publishers in regions including Brazil and Vietnam.

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Microsoft Game Studios, Ubisoft, NetDevil and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include: