Min Kim, vice president of marketing at Nexon America, will deliver a keynote address at the 2009 Game Developers Conference China, organizers have announced.

GDC China, presented by Think Services (also parent of WorldsInMotion), will take place at the Shanghai International Convention Center, October 11-13 of this year.

In his keynote address titled "A Fantastic Westward Journey," Kim will discuss Nexon's experiences in bringing popular Korean games and new business models to North America, as with MapleStory and Kart Rider.

Nexon also developed the internet quiz game, QPlay, which set a world record of 700,000 concurrent users in China in 2004 with Crazy Arcade BnB, and developed South Korea's most played online game KartRider (over 30% of the population).

Nexon plans to re-launch its publishing efforts under a new portal, BlockParty.com, which will house a total of eight titles in the US by the end of 2010 including Dungeon Fighter Online (due to launch later this year) and Dragon Nest.

"Min Kim will be an exceptional and inspirational keynote speaker for China," said Meggan Scavio, GDC China event director. "Nexon's success is proof that there is a market beyond Asia for these types of non-hardcore MMOs."

"Moreover, the game industry has been taken by storm with Nexon's microtransaction business model. The Chinese audience stands to gain a tremendous account of firsthand knowledge, anecdotes and advice from Kim to take back to their companies and studios."

For more information on the 2009 Game Developers Conference China, visit the event's official website.

Social media/gaming ad company Offerpal Media released Offerpal Surveys, a monetization platform enabling game developers and social publishers to reward players with virtual currency for their online products in exchange for filling out surveys

Developers and publishers can currently choose from more than 1,000 survey offers available in over 50 countries from market research firms like Nielsen NetRatings, Comscore, and others. The company's sales staff plan to regularly add new offers through the platform, too.

Offerpal previously provided similar options through its I-Frame product, but Surveys is a standalone module with several additions, like a "Survey of the Day" feature. Users have completed more than five million surveys through the company's services already, paying out almost $12 million to publishers with the survey completions.

"Surveys are among the most popular offers we have, and they’ve always been an important part of our offer mix because they provide consumers with a simple, free way to earn virtual currency or digital goods,” says Offerpal founder and CEO Anu Shukla. "Offerpal Surveys is our new standalone product, and with it, game developers who want to focus exclusively on surveys can easily implement it and start making money in a matter of minutes."

Social game developer Zynga says it now reaches 34 million unique players per day and 70 million unique players each month with its games, which include major hits FarmVille and Mafia Wars.

And in terms of what it calls "monthly active users" -- one player of two different Zynga games counts as two monthly active users -- the company's base has grown from 30 million in April of this year to the current count of 129 million, or 330 percent growth in six months.

Much of that success is due to Facebook, where Zynga says it operates four of the top ten games, including the top two, a claim backed up by data from Facebook tracking firm AppData.

Said Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus of the statistics, "While it is still early in social gaming, the success of our games with the user community underscores the sheer size and potential of this new movement which will finally let fun become the biggest way people interact."

NCsoft has always intended Aion to be a global game, as opposed to strictly a localization of a Korean title. Although the developers maintained the distinctive Eastern art style to differentiate its MMO from other traditional high-fantasy worlds, producer Brian Knox says that extra attention to fleshing out the game's story was a key point of ensuring the game could find a market in the West.

With 400,000 preorders, Aion's launch looks set to make a bigger splash than many major MMO launches in recent years, and in a new Gamasutra feature, we talk to Knox about the journey, the ramp-up and the specific and manifold style and story concerns to which the team had to attend.

Knox says the Korean audience is "very much about trends, so if one person's doing something, everybody tends to do it." So adding more individuality and customization options for Aion in the West was important -- but story is another key factor.

French indie MMO Dofus began when some web developers got together to make a game. With its charming graphical style and free to play area (a small percentage of the full game), Dofus has gained favor with players and critics, propelling the company from a small indie to a larger player.

Ankama was formed in 2001 by Camille Chafer, Emmanuel Darras, and Anthony Roux, and has since grown stealthily to 400 employees, including a new studio in Japan, focusing on animation and manga extensions of the company's properties. The original game was done entirely in Flash, well before it became a popular platform for games.

As the company rolls out Dofus 2.0 and a new game called Wakfu, we spoke with CTO Camille Chafer and international marketing manager Cedric Gerard about Ankama's past and future, including the new animation studio, the ups and downs of working in Flash, and player/subscriber numbers.

In our latest employment-specific 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 Propaganda, Insomniac, Rockstar, 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: