As part of a larger conversation with Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra at the Gstar expo in Busan, South Korea, Ragnarok Online designer Hakkyu Kim has revealed that he is working on a new title in the same vein as the original -- though the Ragnarok name is still owned by Gravity, which distributed the first title. He also revealed a second project of a more conventional nature.

"I’m working on two new projects," Kim said. "One is an MMORPG with a more basic structure, one character to control, but with some deeper, weirder stuff thrown in there. The other title is more niche. It’ll be a 2D cross 3D game in the Ragnarok style. It’ll be pretty different from other games. I’m moving in both directions."

The original Ragnarok Online was a very popular MMORPG in Korea, and one of the first Korean MMOs to make real headway in the West, with its cute pixel graphics and intuitive playstyle.

Ragnarok Online 2, created without Kim's influence, was not nearly as well-received, and has remained in development since its Korean open beta back in May of 2007.

"Many people asked me for this –- 'Why don’t you make another Ragnarok Online style game?'" said Kim. "But of course I was busy making Granado Espada at the time, and maintaining that. But now that I have some time, I’m trying to do it."

"It will be more action-oriented, but still an MMORPG," he concluded. Hakkyu Kim's company, IMC Games, most recently completed Granado Espada, known in the U.S. as Sword of the New World, which was by turns both lauded and criticized for its complexity. The game remains profitable, and has its most solid userbase in Japan.

The Australian government's Classification Board refused classification for THQ and Vogster Entertainment's CrimeCraft, effectively banning the free-to-play gang-based MMO shooter from sale in the country, due to in-game "drug use related to incentives or rewards".

In CrimeCraft, players can create, trade, and use "Boosts", fictional drugs that can improve their character's performance. In the U.S., where it released last August, the free-to-play PC game received a "Mature" rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board due to its "blood, strong language, suggestive themes, and violence."

"In the board's opinion, there is insufficient delineation between the 'fictional drugs' available in game and real-world proscribed drugs," argues the Classification Board. "Boost parallels the names, chemical elements, administration, treatment, and addictive elements of real-world proscribed drugs, and when used provide quantifiable benefits to a player's character. The game therefore contains drug use related to incentives or rewards and should be refused classification."

20 percent of total video game spending in the U.S. goes toward MMOs and game portals, primarily for monthly subscriptions and online credits, according to a new international study. Home and handheld consoles, the platforms gamers devote most of their money to, takes up 57 percent of the nation's gaming budget (including second-hand trade and digital distribution sales).

TNS and Gamesindustry.com surveyed more than 13,000 respondents aged eight years and older across the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the U.S. for the "Today's Gamers Online Spending & Payments Report". The groups say they were able to calculate and analyze consumers' total gaming budgets based on information provided directly by the consumers it surveyed.

The study's results show that in the U.S., mobile phones account for 3 percent of the country's total games spending, 20 percent on PC games, 57 percent on consoles, 9 percent on massively multiplayer online titles, and 11 percent on game portals -- the last two portions combine to form the 20 percent figure for the online game budget.

European markets, on average, send 15 percent of their gaming budgets to MMOs and portals: Netherlands (18 percent), Germany (16 percent), Belgium (16 percent), UK (12 percent) and France (10 percent). Console games spending dominate all of those countries as well: Netherlands (51 percent), Germany (45 percent), Belgium (55 percent), UK (64 percent) and France (66 percent).

Social network appointed Alex St. John, the controversial founder and former CEO for online games network WildTangent, as its new president and chief technology officer, responsible for the company's product development, technology, network operations and audience acquisition.

Established in 2003, hi5 claims more than 60 million users worldwide, a fraction of Facebook's 325 million users but enough to make the site one of the top 20 largest in the world. The company hopes to grow its presence in the social gaming space, launching a series of titles like The Legend of Spirehold and Organized Crime last spring.

St. John believes that hi5 will need to create original, unique games in order to find success in this space. "Chasing the crowd is not an interesting strategy," he commented in an interview with VC news site VentureBeat. “I would like to do something highly differentiated."

He stepped down from WildTangent, the company he founded in 1998 last year due to personal reasons. During his time there, he helped grow the network's audience to 30 million monthly active users and predicted the death of video game consoles, declaring online PC gaming as their successor. Prior to WildTangent, he helped create DirectX and was a games evangelist at Microsoft.

Now at hi5, St. John says he'll help transform the platform into a social gaming and entertainment destination: "I intend to have a very aggressive content strategy. I hope to surprise folks. The social game party started without me. But hi5 is the best positioned to jump into the middle of the party."

London-based developer Mind Candy announced that Moshi Monsters, a free-to-play social online game allowing kids to adopt and raise pet monsters, reached 10 million registered players.

Launched in April 2008, the browser-based MMO has players choosing from one of six monsters to customize and nurture, decorating their homes, playing minigames (e.g. a Bejeweled-style puzzer), and solving puzzles that test skills like basic math, spatial awareness, logic, and vocabulary.

After completing puzzles, kids earn Rox, the in-game currency used to purchase accessories, pet food, and furniture for their homes. Though Moshi Monsters is free to play, the game offers a $5.95 monthly subscription promising access to exclusive areas, features, and a Rox tree players can shake for free money.

Mind Candy says more than one million new players join the Moshi Monsters site every month. Its players have created more than 10 million monsters to date, played over 120 million educational puzzles. They also spend a lot of Rox, purchasing more than 1 million virtual items each day.

"We’ve been astounded with the growth of the game this year," says Mind Candy's CEO Michael Acton Smith. "Most of the growth has been due to word-of-mouth which is a great endorsement from our players that they love the Moshi world and want to share it with friends."

In a discussion at G* in Busan, South Korea, NCsoft PR team leader Jin-Won Yun has revealed that the company is looking into bringing a multi-platform MMO to console.

“After we finished Aion,” he began, “we started thinking about what it would take to make an MMO come to consoles. We’re testing that possibility. We’re not in the development process yet, but we’re in the thinking and planning stages,” Yun admitted.

What kind of shape might this game take? NCsoft is looking platform-agnostic. “We believe that there’s potential in multi-platform MMOs,” says Yun, “like Final Fantasy 11, for example. That’s one of the patterns that might be possible, but we’re keeping all options open.”

The resurrection of Mythos, the instanced-dungeon MMORPG lost in the closure of Flagship Studios, is well underway, as Redbana begins unveiling details of its plans to bring the game to North America.

South Korean MMO developer HanbitSoft retained the IP rights to the project after Flagship closed its doors. HanbitSoft's parent company, T3 Entertainment, also owns Redbana, the North American development and publishing arm which is handling free-to-play Mythos.

Though the company revealed its intention to continue work with the game earlier this year -- developed mainly by T3 and supported by Redbana -- Redbana is now unveiling the early fruits of its efforts via a new teaser site showing trailer footage and new content, while offering curious users a way to keep up on the game's development progress.

"We’re privileged to be able to take the helm of this ambitious and highly-regarded project,” says Young Rok Park, CEO of Redbana. According to the company, Mythos' 2008 beta attracted many fans.

Redbana launched its North America-focused efforts by taking back the Western operations of multiplayer dance game Audition, and says publishing Mythos represents a diversification of its offering. "Our vision is to deliver a diverse selection of high quality games to the North American market," says Park.

Many veterans of the Flagship Studios team that had been at work on Mythos reformed as Runic Games, which recently launched the Diablo-like Torchlight, itself said to contain the influence of Mythos' original vision.

Farmville developer Zynga has teamed up with non-profit group The Hidden Agenda Project to host a game development contest encouraging students to produce a fun and engaging educational game that teaches a high school subject through the Facebook platform.

Based in Austin, The Hidden Agenda Project hopes to teach children who do not or cannot learn school subjects through traditional methods. The organization hosts an annual competition in the United States to produce games for kids who face challenges learning in traditional school environments.

Hidden Agenda's titles teach topics like chemistry, physics and algebra, and have been distributed on computers donated to "thousands of underprivileged students in urban areas". The project's team of advisors include luminaries like famed designer Richard Garriott, game-based learning expert Marc Prensky, and many others.

Zynga is the lead sponsor and advisor for this year's event, which offers a $25,000 prize to the college or graduate school team that produces the winning title (announced next spring). The grand prize entry entry will need to effectively teach a high school subject through social interaction.

Despite recent troubles and backlashes against offer-based ad networks, gWallet, a new social media monetization platform, revealed that it has picked up $12.5 million in its first round of funding, which will go towards the company's expansion and new acquisitions. The round was led by Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures.

Based in San Francisco, gWallet says it will use its new cash to establish offices in Europe to better serve global brands looking to capitalize on the growing social media space. The startup plans to open new branches in the coming months and to have a "substantial presence" in New York. It's also planning to set up its European headquarters in London next year.

"Social Media has brought about an abrupt change in consumer Internet behavior where the web experience is now more of a personal experience, interacting with the people closest to us rather than reaching out around the world," says founder Gurbaksh Chahal. "Marketers are rushing to be part of this shift and virtual currency is one of the most innovative ways brands can connect with consumers."

Offer-based ad networks -- platforms that enable social game and application developers to give their users virtual currency if they participate in online quizzes, surveys, or subscription trials -- have come under fire recently due to scam-like ads that charge users or sign them up for bogus products/services without their knowledge.

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.

For the third week in a row, Zynga's FishVille tops the chart of "gainers", after beefing up another 20.1 percent with 4.4 million new users -- bringing its total player count up to 21.3 million and making the aquarium simulator the eighth most popular application on the network.

The company's other leading game, FarmVille, attracted 1.8 million new farmers (+3.3 percent) but dropped from #2 to #3, replaced by CrowdStar's Happy Pets, which enjoyed a 2.2 million surge (+40 percent).

RockYou's Zoo World (+31.6 percent), Mob Science's Snowball Fight (+41.4 percent), and Zynga's Cafe World (+3.3 percent) all brought in around 1 million new monthly active users each, though LOLapps's Champions Online (589,545, +40.1 percent), a social gaming adaptation of Cryptic/Atari's PC MMORPG, fell from #10 to #16.

The top 10 chart of growing userbases welcomed two new faces: IGG Inc.'s fish farm and "tropical getaway" Fish Isle (1.1 million, +56.6) at #5 and LOLapps's World War II RPG Band of Heroes (669,775, +47.3) at #10.

Bellevue-based Smith & Tinker, the company behind the Nanovor toy and its accompanying online game site, revealed that it laid off 30 percent of its workers as the firm sought to cut back its staff to "a healthy operational size".

Jordan Weisman, the veteran game designer and entrepreneur who established FASA and created series like Shadowrun and MechWarrior, co-founded Smith & Tinker in 2007 and serves as its CEO. Of the company's some 50 workers, around 15 were made redundant this week.

Smith & Tinker announced last August that it raised $29 million in venture capital to support Nanovor's recent launch, maintain operations, fund online and television marketing, and push new updates for the online game.

The toy side of Nanovor constitutes a figure starter kit (collectible figure, digital version of the figure, DVD with animated episodes, and Nanocash in-game currency) and Nanoscope devices (pictured) that kids use to train and battle virtual microscopic bugs. The PC game component offers a free-to-play MMO where they can fight and trade online.

Smith & Tinker didn't indicate if lackluster sales for the Nanovor toys or the online game's virtual currency motivated the headcount reduction, but the startup said it hire a significant amount of employees to meet deadlines for the product's launch.

"As many startups do, we staffed aggressively early on to meet deadlines for launching our product online and at retail this year," the company explained in a statement posted by VentureBeat. "These layoffs are needed to bring our organization to a healthy operational size for the remainder of this year and 2010."

"Nanovor has been recognized by FunFare and Dr. Toy as a hot toy for 2009 and has seen strong consumer adoption to date; the company continues to receive solid support from our board. Employees leaving the company will receive severance packages."

This year, Western games are making decisive inroads into Korea. That's just one major takeaway from Gamasutra's recent visit to South Korea's G* (G-Star) event this year, where we got a close view of the differences between the Korean market and the rest of the world.

G* is South Korea’s answer to E3 or the Tokyo Game Show, a largely consumer-facing event with its own mini-conference and B2B section for those looking to make deals. The show took place from November 26-29, including two weekdays that were somewhat more business oriented, and a weekend for consumers to gawk at the latest goods.

Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra was on hand to get some sound bytes from notable developers, as well as a general lay of the land, and where the Korean and Western markets meet.

Background

I’ve been studying the Korean game market for some 10 years now, and the industry there has gone through no small set of changes. The native game industry in Korea was initially arcade-dominated, eventually moving to PC packaged games and the odd console title.

In a move controversial to many players, EA DICE has restructured the pricing scheme for free-to-play Battlefield Heroes, making some in-game items less expensive -- but harder to earn through gameplay.

The net effect of the restructuring is that free players will have a harder time gaining items without conducting microtransactions, according to Ars Technica, which reports that many of the game's players are outraged by the change.

The report cited a forum post by one player who estimated he would now have to play 50 games, or 4 hours' worth -- daily -- in order to maintain a single super-weapon. The general impression from these vocal forum users is that the transition means that instead of feeling as if purchases are an option for bonus enhancements, they now feel as if it is mandatory to spend money just to maintain the level of play to which they have become accustomed.

The transition announcement comes at the same time EA CEO John Riccitiello has begun speaking publicly and to media outlets including Gamasutra about the publisher's shift in focus toward digital business models, and EA's aim to have online revenue constitute a larger portion of its mix.

Prepaid card company Zeevex announced exclusive agreements with two online game publishers, Owlient and Sunleaf Studios, to distribute prepaid game cards with virtual currency for their titles.

Zeevex's Xtreme Game Card is sold in over 22,000 U.S. national retail locations like GameStop, Blockbuster, Toys R Us, 7-Eleven, and many others. Consumers can use the cards for multiple supported games and access a Zeevex Digital Locker, which allows them to purchase, store, and receive virtual items.

Founded in 2008 and operating with offices in Atlanta, Georgia, and Palo Alto, Zeevex says it's on track to serve more than 18 million gamers in the U.S. by the end of the year. In 2010, the company expects to expands its U.S. footprint and set up international operations, as well. Its partners also include Frogster, Outspark, and True Games.

Owlients releases include Babydow, an online baby simulation game with more than 725,000 players; and Howrse, a horse training/breeding/competition game claiming 3.9 million players. Sunleaf's Pandanda, a virtual world in which kids create and control Red Panda avatars, attracts around 3 million users, each month.

"Zeevex is the gamer-friendly leader in monetization services for online games, virtual worlds, and social networks," says Zeevex CEO Ron Williams. "Partnering with Owlient and Sunleaf is a positive endorsement of the Zeevex virtual currency and our market leadership in providing microtransaction platforms."

HeyZap, which provides online developers with a platform for monetizing and distributing Flash games, launched an achievements platform for HeyZap-enabled games. Styled after Xbox Live's Gamerscore and PlayStation Network's Trophies, the system allows developers to tie in virtual currency to achievements in their games.

The platform uses HeyZap Coins, which allows players to use real money to purchase virtual currency, which in turn can be used to buy digital goods in Flash games. Now they can also earn virtual currency by completing specific tasks in games like reaching a certain score, defeating a predetermined amount of enemies, or completing a level.

With this dual-currency model, users have the option of either going through a game as they normally would, receiving a stream of points that they can use to eventually access different virtual goods, or pay to immediately unlock in-game items or other benefits. Popular titles like Zynga's FarmVille or Mafia Wars already use this system.

Similar to home console achievement systems, HeyZap's platform will allow users to create their own unique ID that they can use across multiple games. The Gamer Profile will track their records, virtual items, and high scores. Players can also broadcast their achievements through Twitter or Facebook.

Founded last year and based in San Francisco, HeyZap currently employs nine workers. The startup says 50 Flash games already use its payment system for virtual currency and 500 developers are signed up to take advantage of the Heyzap platform. 100,000 sites also use its embeddable Flash game visit, with over 10 million games played each month.

Social media/gaming ad company Offerpal Media announced Offerpal Shopping, a new way for consumers to earn virtual currency for online games and social networks by shopping online with hundreds of brand-name retailers like Macy's, Gap, Priceline, and Buy.com.

By purchasing different kinds of products (e.g. electronics, clothes, gifts, software, furniture, etc.) from online stores, consumers can receive virtual currency back for every dollar they spend. Offerpal says they'll typically receive 5 to 10 percent back of their purchase, but can also see reimbursements up to 30 percent of more.

The Shopping program is accessible through a tab inside an Offerpal I-frame, which is available in over 2,000 online games, social networks, and virtual worlds. Users can browse through available retailers and see product descriptions, amounts of virtual currency reimbursements, minimum purchase requirements, and the length of time it will take to receive the virtual currency.

Developers can choose to turn Offerpal Shopping on or off for their games. It's also available as a standalone I-frame for developers that are interested in a separate integration. Offerpal says its early tests of the program demonstrated "a clear lift in both incremental revenue and payment conversions for the company's publishing partners."

The new service comes after a month full of controversy over offer-based ad networks and social gaming developers using scam-like ads enticing users to sign up for misleading offers to earn virtual currency. Offerpal vowed to enact new standards and promised to emphasize its legitimacy with "high-value offers" from recognizable brands.

"Our goal has always been to give consumers an alternative to paying for virtual currency by letting them earn it instead -- whether by filling out ad offers, completing surveys, or now simply by shopping for the types of goods and services they already use every day," says Offerpal Media CEO George Garrick. "We are also proud to deliver a new way for game developers to monetize their traffic and reward their most loyal users."

Video game development and production company Good Game Productions announced its launch, promising to bring popular free-to-play massively multiplayer online games to social platforms like the iPhone and Facebook.

The team is headed Grantley Day, founder and CEO of Good Game. Prior to establishing the studio, the games industry veteran worked as the vice president of technology at TC Digital Entertainment, a subsidiary of children's entertainment company 4Kids. TC's products include the Chaotic Trading Card Game, which features an online game component.

Previous to TC, Day was vice president of production at K2 Network, where he helped launch Sword of the New World. He also served as Atari's executive producer for Dungeons and Dragons Online and Neverwinter Nights 2, and Namco's PC Development director for Warhammer, Mage Knight and Hellgate: London.

Good Game has several games and applications in development, and expects to release its first product this winter. Its current partners include Ntreev (Pangya, Trickster Online), True Games (Mytheon, Warrior Epic), and game card company GoCash.

The company believes its rapid development style and business model of bringing MMOs to rising platforms like iPhone and Facebook will position it at "the heart of the future online games market". Day comments, "Our business model allows online game companies to attract new users to their product by bringing their game to a whole new audience."

"The new mobile devices and social networking platforms that are gobbling up users and growing at breakneck speeds are the perfect audience to target and revolutionize the Free-To-Play MMO space," he adds. "Facebook is changing the way we look at our friends and the people we play games with, and I believe the iPhone is the platform of the future."

Good Game has already uploaded several tutorial videos for playing Warrior Epic: Sagas, an iPhone and Facebook adaptation of True Games's free-to-play MMO. You can watch a couple of them after the break.

As game developers grapple with making microtransactions more appealing to Western gamers, there are roadblocks to the full acceptance of the business model that stem from users' perceptions of value, fairness, and fun.

In a new feature at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, Daniel Kromand interviewed hardcore gamers, and found that there are places where the model is on the right track, and some areas that still need significant work.

One of the outstanding microtransaction issues that many gamers are concerned with is the potential ability to buy better items, such as weapons or armor, enabling a paying player to overpower a non-paying player.

"Some games have premium items for sale, but the interviewed players were largely skeptical towards these transactions," Kromand found. "The reason is that they threaten to tilt the perceived fairness of the game, because established players fear that newcomers can buy their way to success."

Game Developer magazine's editors have launched the 2009 State Of Game Development purchasing survey, with an all-access GDC 2010 pass as incentive for completing the questions.

The survey covers topics such as company size, market sectors worked in and tools used, and should be filled out by any current professional game developer. Select results will be published in an upcoming issue of Game Developer magazine and made available in a Game Developer Research report..

In appreciation of the time and effort taken, once participants complete the survey, their name will be entered into a drawing to win one All-Access Conference Pass to Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March 2010.

However, besides the name registration to win the prize, this survey is anonymous. None of the information presented will be associated with any individuals, with overarching trends being the overall point of the survey.

You can now access the 2009 State Of Game Development purchasing survey, which takes approximately 5-7 minutes to complete.

Already dominating a number of game genres on Facebook -- farming, restaurants, aquariums, mafia, cards, etc. -- social games giant Zynga is pushing its way into another popular space: pet-raising.

Launched yesterday, PetVille, like other pet titles that've launched on the social network in the past year, allows you to raise, dress, and care for a virtual animal. You can also visit friends' houses to play with their pets, and earn in-game currency to purchase customizations for your creature and its house.

Other established Facebook games in this genre include Slide's SuperPoke! Pets, CrowdStar's Happy Pets, and Playfish's Pet Society, the last of which has had since 2008 to pick up 21.5 million users, making it the eighth more popular app on the platform (according to numbers from AppData) and Playfish's most successful title.

Happy Pets has also done well for CrowdStar since its launch several weeks ago, already boasting 6.2 monthly active users. Though it only has a fraction of Pet Society's audience and is ranked as only the 39th most popular app, the game has appeared on the "top 10 gainers" list the past two weeks, rapidly attracting new players.

That doesn't mean PetVille won't stand a chance against its established competition, however, as proven by Zynga's other recently launched title FishVille. Debuted in early November, the aquarium simulator is already the 7th most popular application on the social network with 22.4 million users, gaining on CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium (#5, 27.4 million users).

You can watch a short introduction to PetVille (no audio), captured and uploaded by Games.com, after the break.

AdventureQuest Worlds developer and publisher Artix Entertainment announced the acquisition of player-versus-player-focused MMORPG EpicDuel. To celebrate its first acquisition of another gaming studio, Artis will release a "new and improved version" of the online game tonight.

Currently in its beta phase, EpicDuel is a free-to-play, browser-based fighting game from Epic Inventions, a two-person team founded in early 2008. The title allows players to create customizable characters in three different classes, upgrade skills, collect weapons, and battle in 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 matches.

With the new game release, Artis plans to begin an alpha test of a Master Account system that will eventually unify the logins for all of the studio's web-based games, which include AdventureQuest Worlds, AdventureQuest, MechQuest, and DragonFable.

"We lost two days of productivity from addictively playing EpicDuel," says Artix Entertainment CEO and founder Adam Bohn. "We were amazed how their team, game, and community felt just like ours. We knew this was meant to happen. They are now proudly part of Artix Entertainment."

"With the EpicDuel team firmly in charge of their game, we gave them access to our artists, programmers, and player support in addition to ordering as many servers as they wanted. Thirteen coffee pots, five weeks, four game re-writes, three artists, two programmers, and at least one evil vampire lawyer corpse later we are preparing for the big launch."

Ragnarok Online was Gravity’s first popular MMORPG, and one of the first Korean titles ever to make a significant splash in Western markets.

The game was most popular in Japan and Korea, and that’s where the userbase remains strongest. In 2007, Ragnarok II was released to open beta in Korea on the Unreal 2.5 engine, and was relatively poorly recieved.

Nothing has been heard about this sequel until now. In Busan at Korea's G* conference, we asked Global Business Manager Yunghun Lee what happened to Ragnarok II.

“It’s a difficult question to answer,” Lee admitted. “We launched Ragnarok II in 2007. That version wasn’t really enough for the market, so we tried to revise all the systems, but it takes time. We changed the engine and everything, it’s like a totally new game. The engine changed several times, but now we’re using Gamebryo.”

The game is nearing completion now, and Lee says “We’re going to release the game next year.”

Shanghai-based MMO developer and operator CDC Games, a subsidiary of CDC Corporation, appointed Simon Kwong Chi Wong as its new chief executive offer, replacing Peter Yip, who will continue as vice chairman of the company's board of directors.

Wong has served as an independent director of CDC Corporation and CDC Games's board since 2005, and will continue as he takes over the business unit. Previous to CDC, he was a director and executive vice presideot of Techno-Ventures, a joint venture with Advent International and TA Associates.

CDC Games counts over 160 million registered users for its online and mobile games. The firm describes itself as "a pioneer of the free-to-play, pay for merchandise model for online games in China", having released free-to-play MMOs like Yulgang and first-person shooter Special Force.

It has also licensed and published EVE Online, Shaiya, and Digimon RPG in China. CDC Games plans to operate Turbine's The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar in the region, too.

"I am honored to serve as CEO of this exciting company that we believe is poised for growth,” says Wong. "CDC Games has exciting games being launched, including The Lord of the Rings Online and new locally developed games from China."

He adds, "I look forward to helping CDC Games successfully launch these new games in the months ahead, as well as execute on its strategic growth initiatives, which I believe will strongly position the company for long-term success."

European online games portal GOA announced that it will close its local servers for free-to-play MMORPG Warrior Epic, launched in the territory just last May, on December 21st, 2009 due to lower than expected player registrations. The company also cancelled its upcoming launch of Mytheon and will terminate its servers for Kart n' Crazy.

Warrior Epic's debut earlier this year was marred with server instability issues and missing features like the item shop. Last month, True Games, the title's North American publisher, announced that its new Beijing studio handled the Warrior Epic's upcoming Battlegrounds expansion, taking over the title from original developer Possibility Space and now managing all future updates.

GOA urges gamers who want to continue playing Warrior Epic to download the U.S. client, maintained by True Games, though the European operator says it's unable to transfer character data and purchased in-game currency to True Games or other publishers for technical reasons. Instead, GOA has arranged a "special offer" with True games to welcome European players that register with the U.S. servers.

The company is also sending out personal emails with a "loyalty package" to Warrior Epic players, offering a payoff through its other games, taking into account the user's previous virtual currency purchases to determine appropriate compensation.

"Unfortunately, despite major efforts by the development team to improve Warrior Epic since its launch, the game hasn’t achieved the player population we had hoped for," said GOA in a notice posted on Warrior Epic's site. "We have therefore decided to focus on our other titles (Warhammer Online, Pangya, and League of Legends) to provide the high level of quality and customer service that we feel you, our players, deserve."

As part of its efforts to refocus on the mentioned titles, GOA also cancelled next year's launch for Petroglyph Games's free-to-play MMO Mytheon in Europe (published by True Games in North America), and will shut down its service for Kart n' Crazy on December 21st. As with Warrior Epic, the publisher is closing Kart n' Crazy due to the game's lack of players.

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 Crystal Dynamics, Firaxis Games 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:

Crystal Dynamics: Lead Designer
"Crystal Dynamics is looking for a talented, innovative lead designer on future AAA title development for Xbox 360 and PS3. We're looking for a candidate who is driven, passionate about making games, willing to take risks, confident that the risk is worth taking and has a solid design background to make it happen. The candidate we're looking for will have current multiplayer, systems and technical experience and excels in highly collaborative, team environments."

THQ/Kaos Studios: Environment Art Supervisor
"We are seeking an experienced Environment Art Supervisor with the skills and passion to drive the designing, organization, modeling, texturing, dressing and lighting of realistically-grounded game worlds. Candidates should have a very strong sense of visual design and an amazing attention to detail. Candidates should be able to build and light environments from scratch by relying on a combination of photo-reference and concept art."

Just a day after we discussed Zynga launching PetVille on Facebook, an obvious rival to Playfish's established and popular Pet Society, Playfish hinted that it's working on a new title that looks to invade a genre that Zynga has a stake in: mob/mafia games.

Playfish posted banner advertisements on its message board inviting gamers to fill out an application for a spot on an upcoming game's pre-beta testing team. The ads, originally captured by Games.com and pasted below, ask viewers, "Do you want to be the most powerful and respected person? Playfish is recruiting Volunteers! Start your gangster career now!"

Zynga's Mafia Wars is currently the sixth most popular application on Facebook, according to AppData, boasting more than 27 million players. Playdom's Mobsters 2: Vendetta only has 5.2 million users on Facebook, but Mobsters is the most popular game on MySpace with 14.2 million players (Mafia Wars has 12.9 million on MySpace), says Inside Social Games.

Similarities between Mafia Wars and another title, Mob Wars, drove the latter game's creator David Maestri to accuse Zynga of copyright infringement and file suit against the company earlier this year. Zynga edited Mafia Wars to differentiate its content from the competitor's, and reportedly settled with Maestri in the "high seven figures".

Playfish's unannounced gangster game is just the latest in a series of copycat titles released between itself and Zynga -- Pet Society and PetVille, Poker Rivals and Texas HoldEm Poker, Restaurant City and Café World, Word Twist and Word Challenge, etc. You can sign up for the pre-beta testing here.