Korean developer and publisher Hanbitsoft acquired the publishing rights for Flagship Studios's troubled PC MMO Hellgate: London in North America, Europe, and Japan from Namco Bandai Games America. The company plans to re-release the game in those three regions following its Hellgate launches in China, Taiwan, and South East Asia later this year.

Developed by a team of Blizzard Entertainment veterans who left the Warcraft/Diablo company to form Flagship, Hellgate originally shipped to stores in October 2007.

Its launch was beset with bugs, crashes, and billing issues, driving many players to cancel their paid subscription or refuse to sign up for a paid subscription at all (the game offered free subscriptions with limited features).

Financial issues eventually led Flagship to shutter in August 2008, though publisher Namcao Bandai kept Hellgate's servers online in North America and Europe until February 2009.

HanbitSoft obtained Flagship's Hellgate and Mythos properties in late 2008 and continued development for the MMO, operating the game in Korea with a free-to-play model.

Working with parent company T3 Entertainment, HanbitSoft has added "online features and user convenience systems" to Hellgate and even launched a new series of upgrades dubbed Hellgate: Resurrection. That series will include the release of Hellgate: Tokyo, which will have players exploring a post-apocalyptic Japan, in March.

"We would like to thank Namco Bandai Games America for allowing us to acquire the Hellgate publishing rights and are thrilled to have eager gamers worldwide return and enjoy the franchise," says HanbitSoft CEO Kee-Young Kim.

"Hellgate: Resurrection is heading towards success in Korea such that we decided to push ahead with launching the game overseas next year. We will do our best to get the game to the fans as soon as possible."

Hamburg-based developer and publisher Bigpoint announced its appointment of Marko Hein to the newly created position of chief game officer, where he is tasked with managing the development and orientation of the company's product strategy and community operations. He is also responsible for heading up Bigpoint's game design, producing, community management, item selling, and art divisions.

Hein's appointment follows several recent and significant milestones and changes at Bigpoint, including the hiring of Lothar Eckstein as chief marketing officer in early December, the creation of a new casual-focused gaming portal as a spin-off of free-to-play hardcore gaming site Bigpoint.com, and the 100 millionth user registering on Bigpoint.com last week.

Before joining Bigpoint as CGO and serving as a consultant to the company for a year, Hein was general manager of console video game publisher THQ's Zurich office. He's also worked at Koch Media and Nintendo of Europe -- he held various management positions at the latter, including head of Product Analysis & Online and head of European Developer Business.

"Game development is the company's heart and soul," says Bigpoint CEO Heiko Hubertz. "That’s why it was imperative that we find an experienced, creative and well-connected candidate for the position of CGO. Marko Hein has what it takes to work at Bigpoint. His creativity, passion, sharp business acumen and sound strategic thinking make him a valuable new addition to the executive team."

Live Gamer, a microtransaction solutions provider for online games, virtual worlds, and social networks, announced the appointment of gaming icon Stevana "Stevie" Case as its senior director of business development.

Case first caught the attention of the industry as a professional gamer when she defeated Quake-designer John Romero in a Quake deathmatch. She later worked at Ion Storm (Deus Ex, Thief) as a game tester and eventually a level designer, then went on to co-found Monkeystone Games, where she served as CEO.

Since then, she's held several management and executive roles, working as the manager of Product Development at Warner Bros.'s wireless division and most recently as the vice president of Business Development and Sales at microtransaction software company fatfoogoo.

Founded in 2007, Live Gamer is headquartered in New York and has offices in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, and Seoul. It provides microtransaction services for a number of gaming, social, and entertainment companies such as Acclaim, Funcom, NHN USA, and Sony Online Entertainment. The company currently supports more than 65 million users in 23 countries.

"Stevie Case is something of an icon in the gaming industry, and has in recent years made her mark as a successful business development professional," says Live Gamer co-founder and president Andrew Schneider. "We’re thrilled to bring her industry expertise into the Live Gamer family."

[Of note to WiM.biz readers - organizers have added a Best New Social/Online Game category to the Choice Awards this year, and the winners will be announced at GDC in San Francisco this March, also home of the Social/Online Games Summit.]

Organizers have revealed the nominees for the tenth annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the leading peer-based video game industry awards. Nominations this year are led by Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, with seven nominations.

The acclaimed title is closely followed by five nominations for Thatgamecompany's evocative downloadable game Flower, and four nominations for Ubisoft Montreal's well-received Renaissance action game sequel Assassin's Creed II.

In addition to the aforementioned Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Assassin's Creed II, this year's Game Of The Year nominations are rounded out by BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins, From Software's Demon's Souls, and Rocksteady Studios' Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Other multiple nominees include notably diverse titles such as PopCap's Plants Vs. Zombies and Infinity Ward's Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The changes in today's game industry are well represented in the Game Developers Choice Awards this year by the inclusion of multiple iPhone titles (including Flight Control and Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor) as nominations in existing categories, as well as console downloadable titles such as Q Games' PixelJunk Shooter and RedLynx's Trials HD.

Organizers have also further diversified the awards by adding a Best New Social/Online Games category this year, with both Facebook and free-to-play online games competing for the new prize.

Along with appointing Bob Komin as its new chief financial officer to replace John Zdanowski, Second Life developer Linden Lab revealed that the economy of its virtual world (based on user-to-user transactions) grew to $567 million in the past year, 65 percent more than the $344 million economy reported in 2008.

Though Linden Lab acknowledges that many businesses based in the virtual world faced many challenges in 2009 just like their real world counterparts, it says that the growth in its economy helped Second Life residents earn a total of $55 million last year, an 11 percent increase over resident earning in 2008. Sales for user-generated virtual items reached $6.1 million, 74 percent more compared to 2008.

The top 25 most successful individuals on Second Life, as a group, earned $12 million of the $55 million total, and more than 50 accounts earned over $100,000 each in 2009. "In 2009, success in Second Life, as in the real world, was not evenly distributed," admits the company. "As in the real world, economic survival is far from guaranteed. However, in 2009, many Residents had significant gross earnings."

The developer also revealed usage statistics -- residents spent 481 million hours in Second Life in 2009, a 21 percent increase over 2008. For the fourth quarter of 2009, however, user hours reached 113 million, a drop from the 118 hours it reported for the Q3 2009. Second Life's user hours have increased for 14 straight quarters since 2006 but fell for the first time ever in Q3 2009, declining from a record high of 126 million in Q2.

As for Linden Lab's new CFO, Komin will head the company's financial matters and controls, legal and administrative functions functions, and human resources. Prior to joining the developer, he was the CFO at solar energy startup Solexel for two years. Before that, he was CFO of privately held voice technology firm Telme Networks for seven years. He also held several senior financial positions at Cincinnati Bell.

"The virtual goods industry is in its early stages and there is enormous potential for Second Life to redefine how people interact with technology and think about what is possible," says Komin. "Linden Lab – a pioneer in this multi-billion dollar industry – is a market leader today, and I am delighted to join the company during this phase of growth."

Mobile payments company Boku raised $25 million in a Series C round led by DAG Ventures, with previous investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures also participating. This brings the Boku's total funding amount up to $38 million since the company was formed in March 2009.

Boku formally launched in June 2009 after acquiring two other mobile payment firms, Paymo Inc. and Mobillcash. It's since secured mobile payment processing relationships with more than 1,000 game and application developers, and claims to have agreements with almost all of the top applications for virtual goods and currencies on Facebook.

The company's service is set up so that players can purchase virtual goods or currency in social games/apps by texting a listed cell phone number; users then receive an automatic charge on their monthly mobile bill. Boku's payment options are available through 190 carriers worldwide in 58 countries, reaching a potential 1.8 billion customers.

The startup also revealed plans to rebrand its consumer platform as Paymo, which was the name of one of the mobile companies it acquired, according to a report from technology news site TechCrunch. Boku will continue to use its current name for its merchant and publishing operations.

"This has been an extremely successful year for Boku, and this new round of funding signals an even stronger future," says Boku CEO Mark Britto. "Every day we are growing and adding new partners, and with the continued support of our investors, we will continue to establish Boku as the standard in mobile payments."

He adds, "Just last month we announced 12 new partnerships with some of the top online game developers in the world, all of whom recognized the value Boku adds to their businesses and customers, and all have seen increased revenue since partnering with Boku."

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.

After a week of games dominating the "gainers" list, non-games have returned to fill up most of the top ten slots, taking up six spots with popular applications like RockYou!'s Birthday Cards, How Original Are My Parents?, Entrevista tus Amigos, Quiz Planet!, Causes, and Facebook for iPhone made up half of the top ten.

Ranked #1 last week, Shikha's Pillow Fight dropped slightly to #2 but continues to draw in new players in droves, adding 2.5 million (16 percent) for a total of 15.6 million monthly active users. RockYou!'s Zoo World at #4 saw significant growth (10 percent), too, moving up a spot from last week and bringing in 1.4 million new zookeepers for a total of 13.6 million.

Down from #5 at now at #7, CrowdStar's Happy Island saw 1.3 million new users, bumping its total up 14 percent to 9.4 million. The final social game in the top ten list of upstarts, Playdom's Tiki Farm, which saw the biggest drop from #2 to #8, brought in 1.1 million new players as its total rose 21 percent to 5.1 million.

The games that dropped off the chart since last week are LOLapps's Facebook adaptation of Electronic Arts's console video game Dante's Inferno, now positioned at #11 with 760,396 new users (+15 percent, 5 million total); and Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker with 547,785 new users (2 percent, 24.4 million total).

Despite the past year's economic hardships, financiers invested over $1.38 billion in online game and virtual goods-related businesses in 2009, more than three times the amount invested in the same market in 2008, according to a new research report. The number of companies receiving investments more than doubled, too, increasing from 34 in 2008 to 87 in 2009.

The 2009 Virtual Goods Investment Report, compiled by Engage Digital Media and microtransactions blog Virtual Goods News, tracked investments from the past year relating to MMOs, online casual/social games, mobile games, virtual worlds, digital goods, avatars, payment services, and development/analytics tools in a virtual goods context.

The report's authors note that of the 87 investments in 2009, financial terms were not disclosed for 29 of the deals. Because estimates for those values are not included in the total, it's likely that the actual amount of money invested in the online game and virtual goods space far exceeds $1.38 billion. Most of the deals took place in 2009's fourth quarter -- nearly $1 billion for 30 companies -- helping offset an freeze in new investments during the first and second quarters.

18 acquisition-related investments made up $398.3 million of the $1.38 billion, most of that owing to Electronic Arts's $300 million purchase of Pet Society developer PlayFish last November. The second biggest chunk came from Chinese mobile company KongZhong’s recent $80 million acquisition of free-to-play 3D MMORPG developer Dacheng (World of Kung Fu).

Global internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies was the largest investor in this segment in 2009, sending $200 million to Facebook and $180 million to FarmVille developer Zynga last month. Though Facebook primarily serves as a social network, the report justifies its inclusion by pointing to its virtual currency platform and estimated annual virtual gift sales of around $75 million.

Behind EA, KhongZhong, and DST, the fourth largest investment went to social gaming and applications developer RockYou!, which received $50 million from Asian backer Softbank. Another social gaming studio, Playdom (Mobsters) saw the next biggest investment when it raised $43 Million in November. More than $600 million was invested in the social game space alone in 2009, compared to $82 million in 2008.

"Virtual goods was the hot story of 2009, driving investment that crossed over into game development, virtual currency, payment services, and social networks," says Engage Digital Media CEO Christopher Sherman. "In the fourth quarter alone companies raised an astounding $944 million, more than double the amount raised in all four quarters of 2008."

Gamers have purchased more than $1.5 million in special virtual goods through Zynga's social games (FarmVille, Mafia Wars) to support relief efforts in Haiti following the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated the country last week.

Gamers have purchased more than $1.5 million in special virtual goods through Zynga's social games (FarmVille, Mafia Wars) to support relief efforts in Haiti following the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated the country last week.

Zynga launched the virtual goods promotion to encourage the 230+ million monthly active users playing its games to donate to Haiti aid. The San Francisco-based company will send 100 percent of the proceeds from its virtual goods sales to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), which has an emergency response team distributing food and other relief to Haitians affected by the earthquake.

The special virtual items in Zynga's games include white corn in FarmVille, a Haitian drum in Mafia Wars, a Haiti fish in FishVille, and a chip package in Zynga Poker. The developer's other titles -- Café World, PetVille, and YoVille -- as well as its official site also advertised links for visitors to donate. The games appear on various social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

More than 300,000 Zynga games players pitched in to raise the $1.5 million amount in just five days. Combined with another promotion the social games developer ran last month to raise money through virtual goods sales for Haitian charities helping local children and women, Zynga and its users have donated a total of $2.7 million to Haiti

"We are extremely grateful to Zynga for this contribution," said Nancy Roman, WFP’s director of communications. "Through their donations, Zynga players are helping us to bring urgently needed food assistance to people who have been plunged into hunger by this devastating earthquake. We started distributing food within 24 hours of the earthquake, and in the coming weeks, we aim to deliver weekly rations to 2 million people."

Social media monetization platform gWallet launched gWallet Ventures, an early-stage venture fund designed to invest in social gaming startups. The company says its goals with the fund is are to demonstrate its commitment to bringing quality games to the space, to encourage innovation, and to ensure that the social gaming industry and its advertising opportunities continue to grow.

gWallet is already searching for investment opportunities, exploring the possibilities of working with both major and small social game developers on Facebook and MySpace to release their titles. The company is collaborating with MySpace itself to help funded companies gain distribution on the social network. MySpace plans to provide promotional opportunities for gWallet Ventures portfolio companies.

As part of its venture fund, gWallet plans to place minority investments ranging from $100,000 to $1 million per startup, develop custom monetization solutions for different titles, work with major publishers to help potential acquisition discussions, direct advertisers to its funded companies for new game projects they might have, and more.

The gWallet Ventures fund was likely made possible by the company's recent raising of $12.5 million, announced last month. Since then, the company has revealed new initiatives for "cleaning up the virtual currency space" like a new metric designed to predict and potentially increase the "lifetime value" of social game/application users, and video campaigns that users can watch to earn virtual currency.

"There are a lot of social gaming companies out there that have not received the attention they deserve," says gWallet CEO and founder Gurbaksh Chahal. "gWallet Ventures is an opportunity for some of these companies to receive the funding they need in order to be successful, and in the end, we think that these funding deals will instill a virtuous cycle of growth among publishers, brands, and consumers alike."

Hong Kong-based social games developer and publisher 6 Waves (World Poker, Happy Harvest), which has managed to pick up more than 50 million monthly active users with its applications and games on Facebook, raised $17.5 million in a recent round of funding.

Hong Kong-based social games developer and publisher 6 Waves raised $17.5 million in a recent round of funding led by technology and internet investment firm Insight Venture Partners. The startup plans to use this new financing to continue building its infrastructure and distribution pipelines, as well as support its international expansion and platform extension.

Founded in 2008 by three former Yahoo employees, 6 Waves has since published over 20 games like World Poker, Happy Harvest, Animal Paradise and My Fishbowl on Facebook. Those titles and its other releases has helped the company attract more than 50 million monthly active users. It's also regularly churning out new games such as Happy Hotel, Dress Me Up and Shadow Empire.

6 waves says its goal is to publish the next generation of social games for every genre, language, and platform. It works with developers to provide services for distribution, localization, monetization and infrastructure to help its clients grow in the social gaming market. The company also cross-promotes clients with an ad network across its many releases.

Though 6 Waves so far has stuck with Facebook, co-founder and CEO Ng says he's examining country- and language-specific social networks like Mmixi, Cyworld, Netlog, and others that "resemble the initial growth curve of Facebook", according to a report from Inside Facebook. He also mentioned the possibility of expanding its office beyond Hong Kong and setting up teams in Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S.

"Social games have expanded rapidly fueled by the strong growth of social networks", says Rex Ng. "Millions of people are connecting with each other and players globally, to meet online and play together everyday. We are excited about this new relationship with Insight given their knowledge and experience of online gaming and their dedication to helping us build geographic diversification and an unparalleled consumer experience."

San Francisco-based Rixty, an alternative payment platform allowing consumers without credit cards of bank accounts to spend money on online entertainment, raised $1.24 million in seed capital, which will go toward building its publisher network, expanding its product offering, and increasing its user base.

Javelin Venture Partners led the funding round, joined by Accelerator Ventures, First Round Capital, Freestyle Capital, Nueva Ventures, Soft Tech VC and several other angel investors. JVP's managing director Noah Doyle and Digg's vice president of Product Management Keval Desai joined Rixty's board of directors, where they will help guide the startup's growth.

Founded in September 2007, Rixty provides a system that allows consumers to make purchases in online games, virtual worlds, and social networks by converting their cash into online credits at more than 20,000 Coinstar kiosks and participating convenience stores. Since the company launched its payments system in 2009, it's added support for more than 100 MMOs and thousands of social/casual games.

"Rixty gives anyone with cash – including the 70 million youth and adults in the U.S. who don’t have credit cards – an easy, convenient and anonymous way to pay for virtual currency for online games, virtual worlds and social networks," says Rixty founder and CEO Ted Sorom. "This additional funding will allow Rixty to expand its network of entertainment partners provide more options for our thousands of consumers."

Headquartered in Shanghai, CDC Games operates a several locally- and foreign-developed massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as EVE Online, Shaiya, Digimon RPG, Special Force Online, Yulgang, and The Legend of Mir 3. It also recently received government approval to launch The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar in the region.

The operator claims more than 150 registered users for its online and mobile games. It also describes itself as a "a pioneer of the free-to-play, pay for merchandise model for online games in China". CDC Games recently made headlines after appointing a new CEO, Simon Kwong Chi Wong, last month to replace Peter Yip, who continues to serve as vice chairman of the board of directors.

The company's plans for 2010 include launching between four to six new domestically produced games -- at least one each quarter -- including a turn-based 2D game, a 2.5D (3D with a fixed perspective) MMORPG, and a casual action title, according to a report from China-focused research firm JLM Pacific Epoch.

Chinese news outlets also report that CDC Games's general manager Sun Jingqing revealed a continue focus on online game operations and not research and development in the short term. Jingqing believe that China has too many operators for the limited supply of game products, which is why CDC games plans to bring more foreign titles to China in the future.

Ahead of launching its new Games and Applications Dashboards "in the coming weeks", Facebook detailed new features for the specialized pages designed to cut down on news feed-spamming notifications while still helping users discover new games and apps.

While news feeds in Facebook are useful for users wanting to follow their friends' activities, photos, links, and other media, many have complained over frivolous game and application notifications that also appear in the stream. The social network hopes to address those criticisms by moving these notifications to Dashboards separated from the default news feed page.

With these new Dashboards, Facebook users can immediately see online games or applications they've recently interacted with at the top of specialized pages. If they don't see a particular title they've played before, they can click a link that offers a complete display of all the games or apps they've interacted with previously.

Each game or application shows recent news items (limited to two), which users can specify to display either global news items like updated content for the title, or personal items such as reminders to make your next move in a turn-based game. For news items that mention specific users (e.g. "Eric sent you a virtual item"), a direct link is provided for that user's Facebook profile.

Nottingham-headquartered MMO developer Monumental Games announced that it secured £2 million ($3.22 million), which it will use to further develop its technology, team's skillset, and relationships with publishers. The company has Maven Capital Partners, joint manager of the Capital for Enterprise (CfE) fund, to thank for this new funding.

Founded in 2005, Monumental develops console titles like MotoGP 09/10 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but mostly works on PC MMOs such as CyberSports's free-to-play Football Superstars and self-published hunting game Hunter's World, the latter of which is based on its own IP. The developer employs more than 100 across three studios in Nottingham, Manchester, and Pune (India).

The CfE Fund is a £75 million ($120.9 million) government initiative launched earlier this year to offer financial support to small- and medium-size UK businesses by helping bridge funding gaps caused by the credit crisis. Maven Capital noted that it was impressed when reviewing Monumental's accomplishments, as it managed to grow to its current size without any third-party equity or debt funding.

"This investment is a major milestone in the evolution of Monumental Games, and a vindication of our decision to focus on this market space," says Monumental's CEO Rik Alexander. "We will use this capital to develop our technology to better serve our teams, develop our skills and further cement our relationships with our publishing partners. It gives us the opportunity to consolidate our growth to date and to pursue some exciting opportunities moving forward."

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 BioWare Austin, Webkinz, 2K Marin 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:

2K Marin: Networking Programmer
"2K Games seeks the talents of a seasoned and passionate Networking Programmer who enjoys a collaborative and creative work environment and is looking to work with like minded professionals to create truly amazing experiences.Design, implement, and debug networking code for state of the art current and next gen titles."

Ganz/Webkinz: Flash Developers
"Now is your chance to join the Ganz team that has brought you such products as Webkinz and Webkinz Jr. You can be a part of developing new adventures!! Ganz is seeking talented and motivated people with a proven love of online entertainment for these positions."

After running a campaign that promised to donate $10 for every Haiti Relief virtual item purchased in its games, Sony Online Entertainment donated $25,000 to the American Red Cross' efforts to help those affected by last week's catastrophic earthquake in Haiti.

SOE offered several virtual items in three of its massively multiplayer online titles. Between January 15-18, players could spend 500 Station Cash (in-game currency equivalent to $5) to purchase either a Haiti Relief Plush Bear in EverQuest, the Protectors of the Faydark Crate in EverQuest II, or a spiked T-Rex pet in Free Realms.

The assistance provided by the AMerican Red Cross in Haiti may include sending relief supplies, relief workers, and financial resources. The online game publisher notes that this is its second charity project with the AMerican Red Cross in 2010, the first being a month-long drive for Child's Play, which provides sick children with toys and games, that raised $26,900.

"In just three days we were able to reach our goal of $25,000 and it's all because of the generosity of our players," says Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley. "They really stepped up for a good cause and we're proud to lend support to the estimated 3 million Haitians affected by the recent earthquakes."