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 5th Cell, Terminal Reality 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:

Robot Entertainment: Game Developer
"Robot Entertainment is a world-class independent game development studio owned and operated by many of the founders of Ensemble Studios. With a team that has proven experience and expertise in creating games that appeal to massive audiences, Robot Entertainment is focused on titles that set new standards for their respective genres as well as groundbreaking original IPs."

Terminal Reality: AI Programmer
"Terminal Reality Inc, is an independent Dallas-area developer devoted to developing top-quality games and technology. Since opening its doors in 1994 Terminal Reality has developed & shipped over 28 game titles including the recently released Ghostbusters: The Video Game on XBox 360, PS3 and PC. Terminal Reality is looking for a programmer who will be able to develop state of the art AI systems. This is your chance to be a part of a talented team working on an exciting AAA Natal Title!"

Online payments solutions provider ClickAndBuy announced the promotion of Michael Doron, formerly the company's New Media vice president for two years, as its vice president of the Americas.

In his new role, Doron will be responsible for leading ClickAndBuy's growin in Latin America, with an emphasis on the Brazilian market. He also is expected to expand the company's offerings to MMORPGs, casual games, social networking, financial services, physical retailers, and paid content.

When he was VP of New Media, he helped ClickAndBuy attract new business from social networking and MMO companies such as Artix Entertainment (AdventureQuest Worlds), Perfect World Entertainment (Perfect World International, Torchlight), Hi5, and Super Rewards. Prior to ClickAndBuy, he was the director of Business Development at Softchoice.

"Michael's extensive experience in digital payments, management and operations makes him a great candidate to help ClickandBuy forge ahead as a worldwide leader in the online payments business worldwide," says ClickAndBuy's chief marketing officer Michael Grodd.

After generating $3 million in revenue this year, San Francisco-based MMORPG community portal Curse.com revealed that it raised $6 million in a second round of funding in early 2009, according to media reports.

San Francisco-based MMORPG community portal Curse.com revealed that it raised $6 million in a second round of funding in early 2009 from new backers Ventech Capital and SoftTech VC. AGF Private Equity, which previously led a Series A round in 2007 that invested $5 million into the company, also participated.

Originally founded in 2005 as a repository for World of Warcraft add-ons, Curse.com has since transformed itself into a network of blogs, databases, forums, wikis, and more for a variety of titles such as Age of Conan, Aion, Final Fantasy XIV, Diablo 3, and several others. The site also offers a PC and Mac Curse client for managing plug-ins for World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Runes of Magic.

The company's focus on catering to devoted MMO fans has paid off, as it counts over 1.6 million active users, attracts 7.4 million unique visitors monthly, and is profitable after generating more than $3 million in revenue in 2009. Since the network launched a premium subscription option ($4.95 monthly) eight months ago, over 34,000 users have signed up to receive extras like an ad-free Curse Client, faster add-on downloads, access to premium beta key giveaways, additional community features, and more.

CEO and founder Hubert Thieblot said Curse.com plans to expand internationally in the near future, according to a report from consumer news site TechCrunch. The company also hopes to continue growing by predicting what titles will be hits and setting up hubs for their communities. Thiebolt added that he anticipates MMOs picking up popularity on consoles soon.

Online games company Shanda Games Limited and software developer Kingsoft Corporation Limited signed a letter of intent to create a joint venture devoted to improving the latter's titles and bringing them to China and international markets. Neither company disclosed financial details on the agreement.

This joint venture continues an existing partnership established earlier this year that has the two Chinese firms operating Kingsoft's free-to-play martial arts MMORPGs JX Online World and JX Online 3. As part of the deal, Shanda handles marketing for the games while Kingsoft oversees operational arrangements.

The two companies say the structure combines the strengths of Kingsoft's 21-year history developing software and Shanda's experience marketing, operating, financing, and managing international business development for titles. Shanda also publishes and operates games like Aion, Ragnarok Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, MapleStory, and many others in China.

"Since embarking on our partnership with Shanda Games in the beginning of this year, we have seen steady increases in both user base and revenue generation from related products," says Kingsoft's chairman and CEO Pak Kwan Kau. "Today we are ready to deepen our partnership through the establishment of a joint venture which will allow us to enhance our products and services with more efficient use of time and resources. Looking forward from this milestone moment, we envision enhanced products and customer satisfaction for years to come."

EVE Online player Curzon Dax scammed investors out of 374.4 billion ISK, the sci-fi-themed, subscription-based MMORPG's currency, with an in-game IPO that promised to reward backers with high returns and expensive ships before the player left the game.

CCP Games's EVE Online is no stranger to controversy, as its player-driven economy and corporation/alliance structure have been the source of several high-profile but fascinating virtual heists and wars. In fact, it's this open, lawless setting that's helped attract so many devoted users to the MMORPG.

While Dax's ISK haul is likely less than the hundreds of billions stolen by the player-run EVE Intergalactic Bank in 2007, it's more than four times what Dynasty Banking (80 billion ISK), another player-run in-game bank, embezzled in January of this year. Comparing the amount to current ISK rates at third-party real money trading services, 374.4 billion ISK would fetch around $14,601 in real-world money.

Dax held an in-game and forum reputation of owning lavish and expensively outfitted ships, according to a report from Massively. He admits that he was worth far less than what many presumed: "To be honest, I've never been worth hundreds of billions of ISK, as most folks think I was. I've been a billionaire, but never the fantastically rich person that I've made myself out to be. It was just an image."

Planet Calypso (formerly Project Entropia) player Buzz Erik Lightyear purchased an in-game space station in the massively multiplayer online virtual universe, spending the equivalent of $330,000 on the property and setting a new record for the most expensive virtual world object.

The free, CryENGINE 2-powered MMO features a real cash economy in which players purchase PED (Project Entropia Dollars), Planet Calypso's in-game currency, which they can in turn spend on clothes and accessories for their avatar, equipment for killing creatures and crafting items, and virtual real estate. They can also withdraw their PED as real world cash -- the game's exchange rate is $.10 for 1 PED.

Developer and publisher First Planet Company opened bidding for the Crystal Palace Space Station's online public auction on December 14th with an initial bid of 1 PED. The top offer crept up to 1 million PED yesterday, and a bidding war ensued between several interested buyers in the auction's final hours, pushing the final price to 3,300,000 PED, or $330,000.

As for what makes the Crystal Palace so valuable, it's already a popular hunting destination with exclusive creatures, four themed hunting domes, 17 shopping booths, a space craft docking area, an event area in each dome, and more. Buzz Erik Lightyear not only receives the property deed for the space station, but the deeds for the shopping booths and exclusive taxation rights for activities.

The previous most expensive virtual world object was also auctioned off in Planet Calypso. In 2005, Jon "Neverdie" Jacobs bought a virtual space resort for $100,000. According to First Planet Company, Jacobs's fortune was valued at $1.5 million in 2006 based on profits from the virtual nightclub, mining/hunting rights, and property sales. The real estate earned the player $50,000 from the mining/hunting rights alone in its first five months.

Prior to that, David “Deathifier” Storey bought Project Calypso's Treasure Island property in 2004 for $26,500, earning back his full investment in a year and continuing to make a profit. Both virtual areas were recognized by the Guinness World Records Book in their respective years as the most expensive virtual items ever sold.

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.

Though birthday/holiday-themed apps (e.g. RockYou!'s Birthday Cards! at #6) and other non-game apps dominated this week's top ten list of "gainers," this latest chart has slightly more games this time around, including a new one at #1.

Shikha's Pilow Fight apparently received some attention from CNN, which helped nearly double the app's audience to 7.2 million users with 3.5 new players. The simple game allows "friends, crushes, affair[s], love[rs], kids, or enemies" send virtual pillow hits to each other.

Zynga's PetVille is at #4 for the second week in a row, but it has 2.6 million new gamers, a 14.9 percent growth. Now at 16.9 million players, if this pet adoption sim continues to bring in new users at this rate, it'll hit the top 10 most popular Facebook apps list in several weeks, just like Zynga's other recent top 10 entry, FishVille.

Though it dropped slightly from #5 to #7, CrowdStar's newly launched Happy Island attracted 2 million new users, a 42 percent audience increase. RockYou!'s Zoo World also slipped from #8 to #10 while gaining 1.6 million players (+16.3 percent).

Atul Bagga, an analyst with investment firm ThinkEquity, believes the U.S.'s virtual goods market could double in 2010 compared to its 2009 estimated revenue of $1 billion.

Referring to major acquisitions and financing in the social gaming space in recent months such as Electronic Arts's $275 million purchase of Playfish and Zynga's $180 million investment round, Bagga noted thas more publishers and developers are trying out virtual goods. "The bigger companies are putting their weight behind this model," he argued.

Though many social games feature advertisements, that revenue model is secondary to virtual goods sales for companies like Playfish and CrowdsStar. The latter company, whose titles include Happy Pets and Happy Aquarium, went so far as to abandon in-game ads to focus on virtual goods, and has seen a considerable financial improvement since.

"People don't want to click on an ad while playing a game," said CrowdStar advisor Netanel Jacobsson (formerly a Facebook executive), according to a report from Reuters. "They don't want to be thrown out of the application [to view the ad]"

Jeremy Liew -- managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has invested around $10 million in virtual goods companies -- estimates as much as 90 percent of new online game startups sell virtual goods. He commented, "If people were not employing that model, then I'd have a lot of questions as to why they didn't have that."

Hoping to attract China's gamers to the World of Fight's upcoming open beta, Shanghai-based online game operator and developer The9 is offering Q Coins (the virtual currency of rival publisher Tencent) to players of Tencent similar MMO Dungeon and Fighter.

As part of the promotion, The9 says it will compensate Dungeon and Fighter fans with 20 Q Coins (RMB 20, $2.93) if they play World of Fight's beta when it launches on January 8th and are not satisfied. Those gamers who decide to continue to play World of Fight after trying it out will receive virtual item packages worth as much as RMB 50 ($7.33).

The9 likely sees a shared target audience between the two games based on their presentation similarities -- both Dungeon and Fighter and World of Fight are side-scrolling online fighting titles with casual gaming elements. Dungeon and Fighter is known as Dungeon Fighter Online in the U.S., where it launched last September thanks to Nexon America.

Gamers in the West have previously criticized World of Fight due to its perceived similarities to World of Warcraft. The logo for WoF is eerily similar to WoW's, and its website, wofchina.com, is only one letter away from Chinese WoW site wowchina.com. The9 previously served as WoW's operator in China before losing the contract to NetEase last June -- a loss that resulted in a 94 percent drop in its Q3 2009 year-over-year profit.

South Korean publisher Webzen also recently filed suit against The9 for infringed on its Mu Online trademark by developing its own MUX MMORPG (Miracle: Ultimate X), which appears to share many similar game elements. In this case, The9 also previously served as Mu Online's operator for Webzen, a partnership that was predictably canceled when The9 revealed MUX.

The9 pointed to Tencent's Dungeon and Fighter as its biggest "concern" with the impending launch of World of Fight, according to a report from China-focused research firm JLM Pacific Epoch. The operator also said it has a total of 200 million Q Coins (RMB 200 million, $29.3 milion) to gamers who join World of Fight from Dungeon and Fighter.

In a new Intel-sponsored feature, part of sister site Gamasutra's Visual Computing section, the technical experts behind Mythic and EA's Warhammer Online discuss the mechanics of keeping the MMO running across multiple servers and data centers.

As the article notes by way of introduction to the high-pressure world of keeping an MMO running smoothly:

"Late at night in unattended server rooms around the world, noiseless except for the soft whir of cooling fans, the peculiar entities that inhabit Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) are in ceaseless motion...

Persistence is a key element of the imaginative Warhammer Online world. Its creators at Mythic Entertainment see that persistence as a differentiator amidst a slate of competitors in the increasingly popular genre of MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games)."

Speaking with interviewer and journalist Charlie Rose on his PBS show last Wednesday, Mark Pincus, CEO of FarmVille developer Zynga, shared his predictions for the social gaming and virtual goods market, and also claimed that he's not in the business strictly for the money; rather, his goal is to create "Internet treasure."

"I’m interested in creating what both of our friend Bing Gordon calls 'Internet treasure,'" the CEO explained to Rose. "And I think that we will be remembered in this point in history for the great consumer branded Internet services that were created that enhance people’s lives, like Amazon, like Google, like Facebook. And as an entrepreneur, the opportunity to potentially create one of those branded services is what turns me on and what I hope to one day do."

Zynga's games are already a household name for tens of millions of players. The San Francisco-based company is the most successful developers on Facebook in terms of monthly active users for its titles, according to metrics from AppData, and its releases are also popular on MySpace. FarmVille alone claims nearly 74 million players worldwide on Facebook.

Talking about where he sees the social game revenues in five years, Pincus pointed to the Asian market, where he says free games and their virtual goods are already generating several billion dollars annually. He then noted that analyst predictions for the worldwide market growing to more than $8 billion in the next couple years, adding that he sees it jumping to $15 billion in five years.

As for where Pincus sees himself in the future, he referred to friends who've sold off their companies and are now bored, expressing his wish to invest himself in something long-term: "I think so many of us are really searching for our 20-year career. And people said to me, Pincus, you’re a serial entrepreneur. You just love starting company. I say, no, I don’t. It’s really hard. And I would love to find a company I could be at for 20 years."

You can read the full transcript from the Charlie Rose show at TechCrunch. I've also embedded a video excerpt from the interview after the break.

Ndoors Interactive revealed that Child's Play, a non-profit dedicated to collecting and distributing video games and gifts to sick kids, withdrew its support of a recently launched fundraising promotion in Atlantica Online after receiving complaints from players.

The free-to-play, turn-based MMORPG made available a limited edition holiday package that included rare and randomized virtual items for players' game characters (e.g. maid's suitcase, the archangel Michael's sacred wings, a prismatic unicorn). Altantica Online users could purchase the item for 3999 Gcoins (in-game currency equivalent to $40). The company planned to donate proceeds from the bundle's sale to Child's Play.

Players took issue with the virtual box's expensive pricing and the amount Ndoors chose to send to the charity -- 5 percent of gross revenue from package's sales. Several Atlantica Online users sent negative emails to Child's Play organizers voicing their complains, and as a result, the non-profit asked to be withdrawn from the promotion. In accordance with the request, Ndoors has taken down all descriptions, logos, and links to Child's play from its site.

The publisher plans to continue its sale of the limited edition holiday package but is currently looking for a different cause and charity to donate its proceeds to. Ndoors notes that it will strive to provide visibility for its fundraising efforts to players.

"It is incredibly unfortunate that we are unable to give the donation amount that you, our players, raised to this charity due to the negativity of certain players around the nature of the donation and an optional, opt-in purchase," says the Atlantica Online team in an announcement posted on the game's site.

"While we recognize that not all of our players were negative towards the donation and/or box, it is regrettable that the actions of a few have prevented our players, as a whole, from donating to this cause (we say 'as a whole' because our players can still donate directly, and we encourage you to do so)."