MMO game publisher Outspark (Project Powder, Fiesta Online) appointed Owen Mahoney, formerly senior vice president of corporate and business development at Electronic Arts, as its new CEO, tasking the industry veteran with leading the company's efforts to expand its free-to-play audience beyond North America.

Outspark's previous and founding chief executive Susan Choe will stay with the company as chairman of the Board, and will work with Outspark's game developer partners. "With Owen`s leadership and business experience in the global gaming industry, Outspark will evolve as a leading global game industry player," says Choe.

During his nine-year tenure at Electronic Arts, Mahoney managed the giant publisher's worldwide corporate development activities, such as acquisitions, equity investments, and partnerships. Prior to that, he held executive positions at online and software companies in the U.S. and Asia, such as PointCast and Claris Japan.

Since launching in 2007, Outspark has picked up a global registered user base of more than 4.7 million, receiving 5.4 million unique visitors a month. Though its largest free-to-play MMO audience is in North America, the company says it has growing communities in Europe and in the Pacific Rim -- communities that Mahoney has been brought in to help grow further.

Realtime Worlds is moving away from the "traditional monthly subscription model" with its upcoming urban PC MMO APB, and the studio has contracted Redwood City-based Vindicia to provide billing services and fraud management.

The game's official FAQ confirms the adoption of a non-traditional revenue model, although it does not specify the terms of payment. The game will, at least in part, be distributed on retail shelves.

According to a statement released today, Vindicia's Cashbox solution will allow the game to support numerous revenue streams, including subscriptions as well as virtual goods and currencies, and will guard against customer fraud, while "optimizing customer acquisition and retention."

In a statement, the company called online games "particularly vulnerable when it comes to fraudulent activity," across a variety of types of fraud, monetary or otherwise -- including what it describes as "friendly fraud" by way of chargebacks.

Said Vindicia CEO Gene Hoffman, "Launching an online game is a great challenge for any game developer. ...Merchants like Realtime Worlds are building commerce models that maximize customer retention and revenue, and Vindicia is ideally positioned to support how their products reach their fullest potential."

The game will also allow for varying currencies worldwide, as well as player communication in numerous languages.

APB's retail box is being distributed by Electronic Arts' EA Partners division, and is expected to launch on PC in early 2010 -- with console versions having previously been discussed but not currently confirmed.

Riot Games, developer of upcoming multiplayer PC game League of Legends, has completed an $8 million financing round and announced its partnership with Chinese tech giant Tencent, which will provide online services for the game in China. In addition to new investment from Tencent, Riot secured capital from ongoing partners Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital.

Riot hopes its upcoming game, which is styled as a successor to the wildly popular WarCraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, can bring to the core game market some of the business models that have proven extremely successful to casual and social games, particularly in Asia.

Set to launch in October, the game, which the creators discussed recently with Gamasutra, relies on a free-to-play system that allows players to make small payments for additional characters and other convenience-related perks.

The Game Developers Conference Austin (GDC Austin) features lectures, panels and roundtables for developers looking to release successful titles in the burgeoning connected gaming space, and this year's conference has added final sessions from notable game developers at Nexon, Bioware Austin, 2D Boy, Zynga, CCP Games and many others.

Presented by Think Services, GDC Austin returns with three days of main conference content focused on connected games, online games, virtual worlds, and social networking game play and four two-day summits -- the Game Writers, Game Audio, iPhone Games and Independent Games Summits. The event takes place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas September 15-18, 2009. Conference goers wanting to take advantage of pre-registration discounts should register online by September 11.

This year's GDC Austin features three visionary keynotes from industry pioneers at Sony Online Entertainment, Blizzard Entertainment, and successful newcomer Playfish that address the technical knowledge and business advice necessary to create successful virtual worlds, massively multiplayer online (MMO) titles, and social networking games.

Four days of deep-dive sessions cover topics including designing games for non-traditional gamers, developing secure and profitable monetization systems, and leveraging the strengths of social networking platforms to make innovative games. Featured new sessions include:

Zynga, the social game developer behind Facebook games like Mafia Wars, has filed serious accusations against fellow online game maker Playdom. A judge granted a temporary restraining order against the defendants.

Zynga specifically named Playdom, Inc. and four current Playdom employees, one of which allegedly took Zynga's "playbook" on his final day of employment. This playbook, Zynga's September 9 complaint claimed, contains the company's "secret sauce" that is key to the company's successes. The document took millions of dollars, thousands of man hours, and years to compile, Zynga claims.

The complaint, originally found by TechCrunch, continued with more accusations: "Despite being repeatedly caught engaging in illegal competition against Zynga, Playdom remains undeterred."

"As part of the illegal raiding, threatened misappropriation, and on information and belief, actual misappropriation, Playdom now openly resorted to recruiting Zynga employees in illicit fashions as other means to gain access to Zynga's ideas and concepts."

In our latest employment-tastic 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 Rockstar North, Turbine 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 this week include:

[In this column, Niko Partners' Lisa Hanson offers an expert analysis of the rapid growth in the Chinese game market, following the firm's in-depth report on the region's developers, audience and industry.]

There’s no doubt that China is one of the fastest-growing markets for video games (primarily online games) worldwide. With more than 64.9 million online gamers predicted by the end of 2009, there are a lot of questions about Chinese gamers’ behavior and preferences, including how much time do they spend and where do they play games, what hardware do they use, and so on.

As a natural extension of the vast gamer base, China has also cultivated a talented game development force that has been honing its skills for the past few years, achieving a strong reputation globally for game development beyond just the art outsourcing that laid the groundwork for Chinese game development.

While the West has been playing console games for decades, and MMOs since the late 90’s, Chinese business models for games are different than we find here in the West. Subscriptions, as we know them for games like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Age of Conan and others, are available for some AAA titles, but most games utilize the free-to-play (F2P) or item-based sales model instead.

Chinese gamers prefer F2P online games to subscription games and they want to play games on high-end PC hardware. In our most recent report, the 2009 Chinese Gamers Study, we actually had the opportunity to speak to more than 1,850 gamers and get their opinions about the games they play, why they play them, and what works for them as consumers. Nearly 50 percent of the 1,850 gamers surveyed said that they have been gamers for 3-5 years, and 20 percent are hardcore gamers, playing more than 22 hours per week.