Electronic Arts finally broke its silence on weeks of speculation today, confirming its acquisition of social gaming giant Playfish.

The deal is valued at $275 million -- plus $25 million in equity retention arrangements, even higher than the $250 million originally rumored. EA says Playfish's sellers can also earn up to $100 million more, contingent on the achievement of "certain performance milestones" between now and the end of 2011.

The move is aimed at speeding EA's entry into the social gaming space, and to strengthen the company's much-discussed transition into digital, web and wireless markets. Playfish will operate within EA Interactive, a division of the company focused on those markets.

"Social gaming, with its emphasis on friends and community, is seeing tremendous growth and this is the right time to invest to strengthen our participation in this space," says EA Interactive's senior VP and GM Barry Cottle.

When Gamasutra asked EA about the rumors earlier, COO John Schappert was fairly mum, but noted that in the rush to social platforms, interest in the space must be taken with care to "avoid the bubble" in favor of strong, lasting brands.

Playfish certainly appears to be shaping up to find enduring success in a space that's seen something of a gold rush in recent years. Its games, including Pet Society, Word Challenge and Country Story, have become mainstay brands on social networks like Facebook -- to the tune of 135 million installs across the social and mobile platforms it serves.

Playfish has also claimed 50 million monthly active users playing over 1 billion sessions per month across all nine of its titles. The London-headquartered company also just opened its second office in San Francisco, focused on original social games for Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, iPhone and Android.

"The industry is undergoing dramatic transformation, and joining EA is the ideal opportunity for us to push forward our goals to lead in the social entertainment evolution on a faster and much larger scale," says Playfish co-founder and CEO Kristian Segerstrale.

"EAi’s vision and entrepreneurial culture are consistent with our own, and together, we are in position to be the company that defines new and innovative connected experiences that will change the way people play games.”

Under fire for its lead generation offers that users sign up for to receive in-game currency (TechCrunch went so far as to describe the offers as "completely unethical"), social games developer Zynga announced it is taking down its Cost Per Action offers until it can control the ads that appear with its games.

The company's decision was more than likely spurred by Facebook's temporary removal of its new FishVille game last weekend due to scam-like mobile subscription ads that showed up, which the social network prohibits. Though Fishville was launched only two days prior to its suspension, the game had already attracted more than 875,000 users.

Zynga, which previously vowed to remove the mobile ads from its offers, claims the promotions showed up because of a technical glitch with its offer provider, and says that the mobile ads only appeared with 10 percent of pageviews. CEO Mark Pincus admitted in a post on his blog, "Zynga has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with."

"We recognize it is our responsibility to ensure that offers which generate a bad user experience are not shown with any of our games," he continued. "Therefore, we are removing all CPA offers across Zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves. ... This move is worth it for the long-term user experience and value to our partners like Facebook and MySpace."

The developer's move to take out its CPA ads will come at no small cost, as those ads reportedly account for a third of Zynga's total revenues -- though Pincus said it's significantly less, claiming yesterday that the lead generation offers actually made up less than 20 percent its revenues. Zynga believes it needs to have complete control over the offer approval process before it can commit to 100 percent compliance.

"Currently no partner offers a work flow that we can be completely confident in and that is why we chose to remove the offers till we can put it in place," said Pincus in an email to VentureBeat. "We do not have an estimate as to when that will happen but are working with our partners to insure a superior user experience where our users can avail themselves of high quality offers, each of which has been vetted by us for compliance and quality."

Developer Cryptic Studios (Champions Online, City of Heroes) announced its Western release dates for its subscription-based MMORPG Star Trek Online, revealing a February 2nd, 2010 launch for North America and a February 5th, 2010 debut in Europe.

Set 30 years after the events in Star Trek: Nemesis, this sci-fi PC MMORPG has players taking on the role of either a Federation or Klingon officer, captaining starships for their respective factions. Along with exploring different star systems and battling rival crafts, players can beam down to planets with their away teams and engage in ground combat.

Now defunct studio Perpetual Entertainment was the original developer behind the project, working on the game from 2004 to early 2008, but when the company went bankrupt, Cryptic Studios acquired the global rights to develop and publish Star Trek Online, as well as its assets.

Star Trek Online is currently in closed beta, with beta access granted to fans who purchased six-month or lifetime subscriptions to Champions Online -- due to server stability issues, Cryptic has not yet sound out all invitations for the beta..

As Electronic Arts acquires social gaming company Playfish today for $300 million, both companies see the deal as a major step to leadership in the fastest-growing space in gaming.

"The social gaming space has just exploded over the last few months... just between April and September of this year, social gaming has gone from 100 million active users to 250 million active users," Barry Cottle, senior VP and general manager of EA Interactive, tells Gamasutra.

EA Interactive -- or EAi -- is the company's group focused on web and wireless, and the division under which Playfish will now operate. Through EAi, the publisher had been working on establish a strong presence in social networking, but this acquisition gives EA "the chance to establish ourselves in a leadership position overnight," Cottle says.

He explains that a similar strategy -- taking an established, experienced team and giving them EA's brands and infrastructure -- has helped the company gain a major foothold in the mobile space, where its games regularly occupy top 10 slots among the iPhone App Store's game offerings. "This was the logical path," says Cottle.

Every week, we'll examine the most popular Facebook applications (according to MUA, monthly active users), as well as the social network's up-and-coming apps that have picked up the most users in the past seven days.

Zynga's FarmVille leads the pack, as it has for some time now, with some 63.7 million users, nearly double that of the second most popular program, charity applciation Causes (35.2 million).

Zynga dominated the top ten list with a total of five apps: FarmVille, Café World at #3 (28.4 million), Mafia Wars at #4 (26.8 million), YoVille at #8 (19.8 million), and Texas HoldEm Poker at #9 (18.9 million).

CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium placed 5th with 25.1 million monthly active users, as Playfish's (and now Electronic Arts') Pet Society was #6 at 21.6 million, and Slashkey's Farm Town was #8 with 18.5 million.

The worldwide release of NCsoft's fantasy MMO Aion: The Tower of Eternity has proved a success, with the Korean online game publisher announcing an 836 percent leap in year-over-year quarterly profits on revenues that more than doubled.

NCsoft's first half of 2009, which benefited from Aion's Korean launch, had already far eclipsed the preceding quarters, but the third quarter's KRW 46.88 billion (US$40.60 million) in profits and KRW 166.28 billion (US$144.00 million) in revenues were up a further 39 percent and 21 percent, respectively, over the second quarter thanks to Aion's more recent launch in North America and Europe.

The company said its "proportion of overseas sales surged due to Aion's sales in Japan, Taiwan, U.S., and Europe." Overall, the game has been responsible for more than half of NCsoft's total sales in this financial reporting period.

It's a welcome rebound for a company that saw sales cut in half during the same period last year, following disappointing performance by the sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa.

Aion has seen strong retail performance right out of the gate. The game was on sale for only seven days of the third quarter in North America and five days in Europe, but in that time it apparently managed to sell a total of 970,000 boxed units split roughly evenly across those two territories.

Developer Vivaty Inc. launched its Social Gaming Platform (SGP) and On-Demand Web Services for powering social features, ecommerce, content, communication, and live operations used for social games/applications and 3D characters/levels using Flash. To complement the release, Vivaty also posted a 3D demonstration built in Flash on Facebook and its site.

Designed to support back-end web services for creating and maintaining social games, SGP features virtual economy management, virtual item transactions, inventories, stores, a points and leveling system, multiuser and synchronization support, content pipeline and delivery, level and character personalization, , chat, friends list, social network integration, analytics, and more.

The platform includes tools and pipeline support for "converting 3D content into Vivaty 3D Flash and then releasing objects, clothing and animations, etc. into the live social game or application". Vivaty also says the On-Demand Web Services help cut costs associated with servers, such as developing server-side functionality, hosting, and bandwidth overhead.

"Vivaty's vision is to lower the costs and complexity to enable a wide range of social games and applications to flourish on the web," says Vivaty co-founder and CEO Keith McCurdy. "By removing the headaches and costs of back-end services from a Flash developer's worries, and by raising the bar in quality with Vivaty 3D Flash and full 3D characters and levels, highly interactive and immersive social games can be quickly and efficiently developed, launched, and operated well below today's typical cost."

Online sports game publisher Six Degrees raised $7 million in a round of funding led by Time Warner Investments, with returning backers Clearstone Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks also participating. Combined with the $7 million picked up in May 2008, the company has so far secured $14 million.

Founded in 2006 and based in Marina Del Ray, Six Degrees Games runs ActionAllStars.com, a free-to-play, youth-oriented virtual world that takes advantages of licenses with the NBA and MLB to offer sports activities like baseball, basketball surfing, and more. Players can also create customizable characters, decorate personal rooms, and chat with each other.

The site attracts more than a million unique users each month, CEO Minard Hamilton revealed in a report from VentureBeat. The company plans to use its new funding to further expand that growth and bolster its internal development capabilities.

Six Degrees also announced that it plans to add microtransactions to ActionAllStars.com and sell virtual goods to its players. While the site offers a premium monthly subscription for exclusive features (games, events, gear, unlimited shopping/chat, etc.), it also offers a free "30-day pro trial".

[Just a quick reminder from our GDC colleagues about the call for submissions for the 2010 Summits, including indie, social/online, iPhone Summits - with a bonus Independent Games Festival heads-up in there also for students/mobile developers.]

Game Developers Conference 2010 organizers are reminding potential Summit speakers that they have until Friday, Nov. 13th to submit lectures, with IGF Student and Mobile deadlines also impending.

Held on the first two days of GDC 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco -- next March 9th and 10th -- this year’s GDC Summit line-up includes two new events in the form of the Social & Online Games Summit and iPhone Games Summit.

These summits, alongside the GDC Mobile/Handheld, Independent Games, and Serious Games Summits, which are all accepting submissions through the end of Friday, November 13th.

(Other summits also held at GDC 2010 but not currently calling for submissions include one or two-day events on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the IGDA Education Summit, although the Game Localization Summit has an informal call for lectures ending on November 15th.)

In addition, Independent Games Festival 2010 organizers are reminding that, following record IGF Main Competition entries, games are due for submission in the free to enter Student Showcase category by Sunday November 15th, 2009. Separately of this, entries to the IGF Mobile competition -- encompassing iPhone, mobile phone, PSP, DS, Android and other handheld games -- are due by Tuesday, December 1st, 2009.

More information and registration specifics on the 2010 Game Developers Conference can be found at the official GDC 2010 website.

Online game publisher GamesCampus teamed up with Children's Miracle Network to host "Shot-Online For Miracles", an online golf tournament taking place on golf simulation Shot-Online, benefiting the charity and its 170 supported children's hospitals across the country.

The virtual tournament, which begins November 10th, mirrors a real-life tournament that the Children's Miracle Network holds each year for the past 39 years. Several professional and celebrity golfers will participate in the PGA Tour's 2009 Children's Miracle Network Classic on Disney World's Palm and Magnolia Golf Courses.

Gamers pay a $5 entrance fee to take part in the Shot-Online tournament and have a chance to win the Grand Prize comprised of a signed pin flag from the real-life Children's Miracle Network Classic winner, a Children's Miracle Network Classic Ogio golf bag, and four passes to Disney World. The second-place winner receives a Children's Miracle Network polo shirt, hat, balls, and four passes to Disney world; and the third-place winner grabs a shirt, a hat, and balls.

The Children's Miracle Network is a non-profit organization seeking to help sick and injured children. Working with other individuals and organizations, the charity uses its donations to fund medical care, research and education, and improving the lives of some 17 million kids each year.

"We are honored to partner with Children's Miracle Network on this exciting tournament," says GamesCampus Marketing and Business Development EVP David Chang. "It is wonderful to work with such a fantastic charity that helps so many children and families. Shot-Online players have been very supportive when we have held tournaments in the past for other great causes, but the "Shot-Online For Miracles" tournament will be our community's biggest charitable effort yet."

ArenaNet and NCsoft's upcoming online PC role-playing game Guild Wars 2 is aiming for a 2011 launch, following a planned testing phase sometime next year, according to a report on consumer site GameSpot.

"I believe there will be a certain public event in the year 2010, so at this point it could be at least a closed beta test for [Guild Wars 2 and Korea-oriented martial-arms MMOG Blade & Soul]," said NCsoft West CEO Jaeho Lee in a conference call. "The commercialization will be expected at this point probably sometime in the year 2011."

The original Guild Wars did not adopt a monthly subscription business model like many of its competitors. Instead, NCsoft sold standalone campaigns at regular intervals -- with the exception of Eye of the North -- for premium prices. The Eye of the North expansion required that the player have a previous Guild Wars campaign.

NCsoft has confirmed that Guild Wars 2 will not have a monthly subscription fee. Originally, NCsoft's Bellevue, Wash.-based ArenaNet, expected to launch a beta for the game in late 2008, with a launch in 2009.

NCsoft's conference call came on the heels of a strong fiscal Q3, which saw sales and profits rise thanks to the worldwide release of the massively multiplayer online game Aion. The game sold around 970,000 boxed units in North America and Europe combined during the quarter ended September 30.

[The preceding article by Kris Graft originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

Publisher True Games launched an open beta test for Battlegrounds, its first expansion for free-to-play MMORPG Warrior Epic, which adds new quests, items, monsters, a "HUB city", an entire region (Trogken Swamps), player-versus-player gameplay, and more.

It appears that True Games's new Beijing studio is taking over updates on the game from its original developer, Possibility Space. This expansion is the first project from the Chinese development house, and it also plans to create more content for Warrior Epic in the future, too.

True Games also established another new studio last September in Austin, which is currently working on a new IP for the company. Industry veteran Frank Lucero, previously COO at Stray Bullet Games (Shadowbane), heads the internal development group in Texas.

"We are thrilled that the new studio has done such great work on the new expansion, and when players get a chance to check out the new content we think they will agree," says True Games's New Business and Product Development director Peter Cesario. "Now for the first time our community can experience co-op PVP gameplay and the all-new HUB City of Providence where they can meet up, socialize and show off all the cool gear they have earned."

Warrior Epic: Battlegrounds begins its open beta test today, and is expected to formally launch in December.

Capitalizing on the current vampire craze (This fad is still big, right? When does Mummy mania begin?), developer Ohai announced City of Eternals, a new online world on Facebook featuring the blood-sucking monsters. The company touts it as "the first true massively multiplayer online game for modern vampires".

Based in San Francisco, the studoi has worked on its core technology for about a year now and went into the production on the game nine months ago. The twelve-strong team is comprised of experienced MMO developers who've worked on everything from text-based MUDs to titles like EverQuest, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Free Realms.

Ohai reportedly raised $6 million from VC firms August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners last Fall. Though the company has since lost two of its four co-founders, Sony Online Entertainment vets Scott Hartsman and Blake Commagere, CEO Susan Wu believes that's to be expected with start-ups.

In City of Eternals, players take on the role of modern-day vampires in New Valencia, battling monsters, and join clans. They can also "fall in love with a fellow vampire", decorate their homes, take on a trade, chat with others, and more. Players can even involve their friends by enlisting them into their covens.

Social game developer Playdom, which focuses on MySpace- and Facebook-hosted games including Mobsters and Sorority Life, has raised $43 million in a venture capital funding round.

According to a TechCrunch report, the studio's Series A financing pulled in investors including New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners. Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson also further invested into the company.

Playdom, which has 28 million unique monthly users, recently opened a San Francisco studio to supplement its Mountain View headquarters, is best known for its Mobsters series of social games, which is available on MySpace, Facebook, and iPhone.

According to TechCrunch, Playdom says more than 70 percent of its revenue comes from direct payments, 10 percent from advertising, and 20 percent from advertiser deals offered to users, the subject of recent controversy in the social game space.

Unlike many social game studios, Playdom derives most of its web user base from MySpace rather than Facebook. Mobsters is MySpace's top game, with 14 million users as of October -- while the game doesn't rank in Facebook's top 25.

Funcom revealed new incentives to attract lapsed and new subscribers to Age of Conan, including guaranteed access to the beta phase of The Secret World, the developer's upcoming PC and Xbox 360 MMORPG with a modern setting.

The company will offer two weeks of free play to returning AoC subscribers, as well as two weeks of double experience rewards for all players. Gamers that sign up for a three-month subscription will receive guaranteed access to The Secret World's beta when it becomes available.

AoC players that sign up for six months will receive beta access and an in-game AoC helmet that gives its wearer bonus experiences. Those that take on a full-year subscription earn the beta spot, the helmet, and a copy of the fantasy-based MMORPG's forthcoming expansion Rise of the Godslayer.

Funcom has struggled with AoC's player numbers since the title's launch in May 2008, leading the Norwegian developer to shut down 31 of the game's 42 servers. Though the company said AoC's subscriber figures stabilized earlier this year, it recently lowered multiple-month subscription prices and now offers free week-long trials.

Berlin-based social games developer Wooga announced that it raised €5 million (around $7.5 million) in a new round of funding led by Balderton Capital.

It also revealed that Roberto Bonanzinga, a partner at the European VC firm, joined Wooga's board of directors. Holtzbrinck Ventures, which previously invested an undisclosed amount into the developer last August, also participated in the round.

Founded last January, Wooga (a contraction of “World of Gaming”) currently employs a staff of 25 scattered across nine countries. The start-up says it intends to devote this new financing to "hire new talent, continue to develop top quality games, and grow the company further."

The developer released its first game, Brain Buddies, in July 2009 on Facebook, where it's currently one of the top 20 games on the social network with some six million monthly active users. It also has two new titles in "late stage development" that are slated to release in the coming weeks.

“We are proud to have Balderton, one of the world's leading investors in social media and gaming, as our new partner," says Wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann. "We also welcome further funding from Holtzbrinck, which provides a vote of confidence in wooga and its future growth prospects."

He adds, "Wooga focuses on offering a quality user experience that provides a safe, rewarding gaming experience. By providing true value in social gaming, we believe wooga can achieve sustained long-term growth. This investment will allow us to hire more talented people in the coming weeks and months.”

You can see preview art for one of Wooga's upcoming titles after the break.

Independent developer TimeGate Studios has licensed Trinigy's Vision Engine for use in its forthcoming massively multiplayer project, based on an internal, still-unrevealed, intellectual property.

The MMO was first publicly mentioned in 2006, but the Sugar Land, Texas-based studio shared no details about the game's mechanics, setting, or plot -- and that tight-lipped policy hasn't changed since. Today's release characterizes the game only as a "next-generation," "ground-breaking MMO."

When initially announced, TimeGate said it would be using Emergent's Gamebryo suite of development tools for rendering, metrics, and server architecture. The company had previously used Gamebryo in its Kohan series of PC real-time strategy titles. The tech change may reflect some degree of reevaluation or redevelopment of the game.

Trinigy is based in Germany and Texas. Its existing list of Vision Engine licensees includes several MMOs, and a majority of its other projects are PC-based, although there are several console titles as well. TimeGate has given no explicit indication of its target platforms, but it said its licensing agreement applies not only to the current MMO but future MMOs and console games as well.

Most recently, the company recently shipped the multiplayer shooter Section 8 for PC and Xbox 360.

"The Vision Engine is a great fit for our ground-breaking MMO project due to its remarkable flexibility," said TimeGate CEO Adel Chaveleh. "The Vision Engine consistently stands out in terms of MMO-optimized performance, and we are amazed at how quickly we are integrating our concepts in-game."

Playfire, a multiplatform gaming social network, has raised $2.1 million from several gaming and tech notables, including investment firm Atomico Ventures and Atari CEO David Gardner.

The site allows gamers to register the titles they own for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, or other platforms, and interact with other gamers. It was founded in 2007 by Kieran O'Neill, a self-described "serial web entrepreneur" who sold the online video HolyLemon.com that same year, and also co-founded the platform-specific site PlayStation Universe.

Atomico Ventures was co-founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the creators of successful web services Skype, Joost, and Kazaa.

Gardner has been the CEO of publisher Atari since 2008. Prior to that, he served in various executive roles at Electronic Arts, where he worked for over 25 years. More recently, he has been involved in his own investment activities, including participating in the latest funding round conducted by Unity engine developer Unity Technologies.

According to Playfire's official site, the service is in beta and tallies 245,000 users and 40,000 games. Interestingly, it seems to be disproportionately populated by PlayStation 3 gamers, likely a partial product of its co-founder's PlayStation Universe site as well as Playfish's proprietary PlayStation Network "Trophycard" widget.

Just a day after the social game developer announced its raising of $43 million in a Series A round of funding, Playdom (Mobsters, Sorority Life) has put that cash to use with the acquisitions of Facebook app company Green Patch Inc. and iPhone developer Trippert Labs. Playdom did not disclose how much it paid for the two studios.

Green Patch Inc. is best known for its first release, (Lil) Green Patch, a garden simulation app on Facebook that currently maintains around 1.5 million monthly active users. The company's other apps include (Lil) Style Pop, (Lil) Blue Cove, (Lil) Eco Racer, and (Lil) Farm Life, the last of which was launched last August and now attracts more than six million users per month and over 1.25 million daily users.

“We’ve been close to Green Patch since almost the beginning," says Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson, according to a report from Inside Social Games. "We actually work about three blocks from each other. We’re mutual admirers, Green Patch was a social phenomenon, first app dedicated towards a cause."

As for Trippert Labs, the Menlo Park-based company has released web apps and Facebook games (e.g. Fighter Jets) but is primarily an iPhone developer. Its App Store titles include MobAir: Pilot Training, Dr. Ito's Brain Training, The Beach, Blowfish, ZapTap, and Splat!. Playdom also recently entered the iPhone space in July 2009 with a mobile edition of its popular MySpace/Facebook mafia RPG Mobsters.

The acquisitions come only two months after Playdom opened a new office in San Francisco, where it hoped to recruit local talent. The company characterized its growth last September as "explosive", doubling its headcount to 110 employees in just a couple months.

To Electronic Arts, acquiring a major online social gaming company for hundreds of millions of dollars while at the same time announcing deep studio layoffs was a calculated move, perhaps a statement to anyone still questioning the company's strategy moving forward.

"It's no coincidence that we simultaneously announced a cost reduction in connection with the acquisition of PlayFish, because that represents, in our mind, a very important shift to digital direct," said EA SVP and CFO Eric Brown, speaking at the BMO Capital Markets 2009 Annual Digital Entertainment Conference in New York Thursday.

On Monday, EA announced that it sealed a $300 million deal to acquire Pet Society developer PlayFish, which specializes in viral social networking games, making money primarily from microtransactions. That same day, EA announced it would cut 1,500 jobs -- about 16 percent of its total workforce.

EA said that it plans to leverage some of its most recognizable franchises into the social network space via the social networking expertise of PlayFish, a company that hosts 60 million monthly active users, Brown said.

"One of the things they do exceedingly well is make a game for viral distribution … [another is] the quality of the revenue model," the CFO said. Playfish makes its money almost exclusively from microtransactions -- the purchase of virtual items that users can drop into PlayFish titles to enhance their interactive and social experiences. "We bought them for their IP and their game design expertise," Brown said.

Social gaming startup Ohai has announced its first project -- Facebook-enabled vampire MMO City of Eternals -- and here, its co-founders Susan Wu and Don Neufeld talk about the design, business, and technology of getting social gamers to engage with "frictionless MMOs that appeal to everyone in the world."

Ohai is currently operating City of Eternals in an invite-only Alpha as it continues to develop the title -- says Wu, "Our game is built on a web services model, and we can make major gameplay changes on a daily basis."

Susan Wu's background is in venture capital at Charles River Ventures, where she spent 12 years working with startups, including Twitter. Neufeld, on the other hand, comes from Sony Online Entertainment -- where he worked on Planetside and EverQuest 2, among others. The company's staff is pulled largely from experienced MMO developers.

Rather than a fantasy game set in a fictitious medieval realm full of elves and dwarves, the game is centered around a modern-day city populated with four families of vampires -- including characters designed to appeal to a wide variety of users -- and drawn from various pop-culture inspirations.

Sacramento-based law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP says it's exploring a possible class action lawsuit based on "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars."

The investigation comes two weeks after TechCrunch's Michael Arrington chastised major social games developers Zynga, Playfish and Playdom for employing scam-like ads that promise users in-game currency if they sign up for sometimes dubious offers (there are also many legit Cost Per Action offers from reputable companies such as Amazon, eBay and Netflix).

Though Zynga, the studio behind popular Facebook games like Mafia Wars and FarmVille, receives up to a third of its revenues from these CPA offers, it agreed to take down the ads from all of its titles until it could validate and control which specific ones appear. Facebook's recent suspension of FishVille due to the advertisements likely pushed the developer into this decision.

"Users of these games may have been charged without their consent for 'special offers' that result in hidden charges to credit and debit cards, sometimes through the use of phone text messages and auto-recurring SMS subscriptions," argues the law firm. "Many of these companies and advertisers making "special offers" then make it very difficult — or impossible — for users to get their money refunded.

Disney Online received higher subscription revenues from its kid-targeted Club Penguin virtual world during the entertainment company's fourth quarter (ending October 3rd), helping the Interactive Media division's revenues increase year-over-year by 8 percent to 157 million.

The Interactive Media group is comprised of Disney Online, which manages virtual worlds and MMOs like Club Penguin, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and Pixie Hollow; and Disney Interactive Studios, the publisher behind console releases like High School Musical 3 and Sing It.

"For the quarter, the improved operating results were primarily due to lower marketing and product development costs as well as increased Club Penguin subscription revenue at Disney Online, partially offset by higher cost of sales at Disney Interactive Studios," the company reported.

Disney's fiscal year results for the Interactive Media unit, however, showed that revenues decreased 1 percent to $712 million, and posted a net loss of $295 million (compared to a loss of $258 million in the previous fiscal year). The Interactive segment was the only division within the company to report a full-year loss.

"We’re making an investment [in self-published games]," said outgoing CFO Tom Staggs in Disney's earning call, explaining the group's disappointing results. "We’re currently in a loss situation and would like to see that reverse itself as we build out to scale.”