World of Warcraft operations in China have apparently hit yet another roadblock as operator NetEase has suspended new user registrations while it applies for a license to operate the Burning Crusade expansion pack.

In the midst of its transition from operator The9 -- a switch made by Activision Blizzard in order to obtain a more favorable royalty rate -- WoW operations in China have become tangled in a power struggle between two different government groups that differ on how to regulate online game content. As a result, the game saw a long closed beta and two months of downtime in the region last year before it was at last allowed to re-launch.

Now, according to Reuters, NetEase has decided to re-apply to the General Administration of Press and Publication for a license to operate The Burning Crusade, and will disallow new registrations for a week from Monday, ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.

China's Ministry of Culture first approved WoW's relaunch in September 2009, having taken over some of the relevant regulatory responsibilities. However, many of those responsibilities remain the province of GAPP, which demanded the first suspension after claiming the relaunch was greenlit without its input. NetEase has always maintained it never violated any regulations.

Chinese regulators have become increasingly concerned over "undesirable content" in online games. Among the edits made to WoW to allow its launch in China were the replacement of bone piles with sandbags and a color change of enemy blood from red to a vague black mist.

The Chinese government is also cracking down in particular on foreign investments in its burgeoning online game industry, which is expected to grow 30 to 40 percent to $4 billion this year. GAPP has stipulated foreign companies "cannot control or participate in domestic game-operating businesses indirectly through another investment company, signed agreements or by supplying technical support."

Free Realms, Sony Online Entertainment's youth-targeted free-to-play PC MMO, has reached a milestone of eight million unique user registrations, the publisher announced today.

Developed by SOE's San Diego headquarters, Free Realms launched April 28 of last year, giving it an average monthly registration rate of nearly 900,000. The game is free to download and play, with an optional paid subscription conferring various bonuses, as well as in-game microtransactions.

Registrations seem to have slowed somewhat since their peak growth: the game had accrued two million registrations a month after launch and five million three months after launch, meaning its average monthly registration count since last August is approximately 500,000.

Sony did not indicate the size of the game's current active player base.

"Free Realms is more than just a virtual world for our players; it is a portal for imagination," said SOE president John Smedley in a statement. "Our job as developers is to listen to and predict what they want and give them the tools that inspire and compel them to share their experiences with eight million others."

Free Realms was nominated for this year's Best New Social/Online Game award at the Game Developers Choice Awards, to be held on March 11 during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Casual game developer PlayFirst has hired Mitali Pattnaik, previously a social gaming executive at Electronic Arts, to serve as its general manager.

The San Francisco-based studio, developer of games including Diner Dash and Chocolatier, says Pattnaik will drive PlayFirst's social gaming efforts.

Although PlayFirst has released games to social platforms like Facebook, it has traditionally operated mainly in the standard casual sphere of download- and portal-based games. Pattnaik's hire marks a clearer move into the emerging social gaming space.

"Social platforms are a natural fit for PlayFirst," said PlayFirst CEO Mari Baker in a statement. "We have a history of publishing best-selling games for women, and can mine our catalog of great IP to bring well-known brands to the social platform. We are already seeing a large crossover factor between our traditional PC download customers and those playing on Facebook and we expect this trend to continue."

As head of marketing for Electronic Arts' social games group, Pattnaik headed up the launch of The Sims 3's online virtual goods store. She has also served in marketing and management capacities at Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Baker said Pattnaik's experience in online monetization will be of key importance in her new role.

Information on professional networking site LinkedIn suggests Pattnaik has been working at PlayFirst since November of last year -- the same month Electronic Arts acquired social developer Playfish.

A new virtual goods payment method avoids the need for credit cards by employing a different, and widely-available, form of plastic: prepaid calling cards.

San Francisco-based Zeus Research, which says it specializes in "innovative prepaid card solutions," has partnered with New York-based STi Prepaid, a nationwide retail and online seller of calling cards. Zeus says STi's existing cards, of which the company sells some 200 million a year across 200,000 retail outlets, can be used to pay for virtual goods in games whose developers have implemented the Zeus API.

The deal is likely aimed at two specific groups of consumers: those who are unwilling to use credit cards online out of security concerns, and those too young to have their own credit cards. Traditionally, the use of credit cards in online payments has served as a de facto enforcement of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which defines a "child" as an individual under the age of 13.

"Having seen the issues and opportunities in virtual currency first hand, we spent the year building a service which would be simple for a player to use, quick for a publisher to integrate, and which would provide a massive and instant increase in retail outlets to complement the current payment options," said Zeus founder Sean Ryan in a statement.

"By partnering with leading prepaid calling card company STi Prepaid, we open up an entirely new set of local retail outlets for virtual currency card purchases, which will drive this exciting sector even higher."

Zeus plans to launch the service in March, with program partners to be announced then.

Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, best known as two of the original creators of successful photo sharing site Flickr, are getting into MMO development with their latest project, the 2D Flash-based Glitch.

Described on its official website as a "massively-multiplayer game playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web," Glitch is a sidescrolling game that allows the player to explore "the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and hum the world into existence."

The pair's company, Tiny Speck, is distributed primarily between Vancouver and San Francisco, as described in an extensive CNet profile. It also includes key Flickr developers Serguei Mourachov and Eric Costello, as well as Digg's Daniel Burka, who serves as design director.

MMOs aren't new ground for the Flickr founders: Flickr itself was originally born out of a now-defunct MMO called Game Neverending, which closed about nine months after Flickr officially launched.

Butterfield and company apparently never gave up on the MMO aspirations, and with social gaming taking off, the group thinks it "can do for [MMOs] what Nintendo's Wii did for video game consoles," according to CNet, by introducing a level of accessibility the genre has not traditionally maintained.

Glitch will operate on a model incorporating both optional paid subscriptions and virtual goods sales. Tiny Speck says it's a "collaborative simulation" with "anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game" -- but, unlike most MMOs, that interaction is nonviolent.

According to Butterfield, target demographic is "people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes, in their 20s or early 30s," or what he calls "the intersection of NPR listeners and game players."

Tiny Speck hopes to launch Glitch some time this year, and is allowing prospective players to sign up for an alpha test at the game's site.

Bigpoint, a developer and publisher of browser-based and downloadable games like DarkOrbit and The Pimps, has opened a new multipurpose office in Silicon Valley, California, to strengthen its U.S. presence.

This makes the second U.S. location for Hamburg-headquartered Bigpoint, which also operates in New York as well as Berlin and Malta. The new studio will include game development facilities, business development, and marketing staff.

For the next several months, Bigpoint founder and CEO Heiko Hubertz will split his time between Silicon Valley and Hamburg, as the new office establishes its operations.

"The US is one of the most strategically important markets for us," Hubertz said in a statement. "Now that we have spent the past several months building up a strong and experienced management team for our Hamburg headquarters, I am going to personally oversee the successful development of the US market in the coming months."

Bigponit says it already has a considerable stake in the U.S. market, and major entertainment conglomerate NBC Universal is an investor in the company.

Unwilling to pay for virtual goods with a credit card or a prepaid calling card? Now you can earn currency in online games by completing relatively simple, repetitive tasks.

The system, launched this week by online game monetization firm Offerpal, is built on online retailer Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Mechanical Turk allows "requesters" to pay for the aggregate services of workers to complete online tasks that do not typically require highly-skilled labor but which are not well-suited to fully-automated programs -- like editing, photo tagging, and transcription. Workers are paid on a per-completion basis, and Amazon earns a royalty from the requester's fee.

Under the Offerpal Tasks system, players can complete Mechanical Turk requests to earn in-game currency rather than real-world cash, with Offerpal serving as an intermediary between Amazon, the game's publisher, and the player.

"The beauty of earning virtual currency through Amazon Mechanical Turk is that it's very simple work that can be done anywhere at any time, and the payments can add up quickly," said Offerpal Media CEO George Garrick in a statement. "We're proud to leverage Amazon Mechanical Turk to bring social gamers yet another alternative payment method to go along with offers, surveys, shopping, videos and all our other options, while providing developers with another way to monetize larger portions of their audience."

Last month, major social game developer Zynga entered into a new partnership with Offerpal that has users able to obtain in-game currency in return for signing up for advertising offers. Zynga had suspended its offer dealings with Offerpal after allegations about the forthrightness of the offers were brought to light. Offerpal has since announced it reformed its standards. The renewed agreement between the two companies may indicate Zynga will be among the clients to make use of the new Offerpal Tasks system.

Think Services Game Group, organizers of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference (GDC), has announced that the former GDC Austin show – now named Game Developers Conference Online (GDC Online) -- will return to Austin for this year’s October 5-8, 2010 event.

Now in its eighth year at its vibrant Texas venue, the major game trade show and expo has always chiefly been themed around online games, reflecting the local importance of MMOs and online games, thanks to pioneering Austin-based developers like Origin (Ultima Online), and current studios like BioWare Austin (Star Wars: The Old Republic) and Sony Online Entertainment (DC Universe Online).

However, in recent years, the conference has attracted thousands of new worldwide visitors, thanks to its unique position in the hip, culture-friendly city and its nurturing of major emerging topics -- from social network games through virtual goods and beyond. I

With visionary keynotes, expo hall, and vital networking events in one of America’s most creative and independent locations, GDC Online serves as an international hub for developers and business professionals to learn how to take advantage of opportunities in the connected and social gaming space.

For four days this October, GDC Online will feature business development talks, deep-dive technical sessions on programming for connected games, and an expo hall that brings together leading publishers, tool-vendors and service providers for online and social games.

Therefore, newly monikered to better reflect its focus on the dynamic online gaming market – one that has seen an explosion of growth of non-traditional gamers -- GDC Online will return to the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas on October 5-8, 2010.

“All the GDC events in Austin have built a strong reputation for engaging the online development community, and for serving as an essential forum for developers to learn and network. We’re proud to say that GDC Online will continue this legacy,” says Izora de Lillard, Event Director, GDC Online,

“Whether you’re an up-and-coming social game developer, an experienced online game creator looking for technical gems, or a business professional looking to expand into the online game space, GDC Online will be the place to be on October 5-8.”

The call for submissions for GDC Online will open in late spring 2010. For more information on the event, please visit the official GDC Online website.

Online game monetization firm SponsorPay has acquired GratisPay, another monetizer, effectively enacting a merger between the two companies to create one of Europe's largest entities in the advertisement-based monetization segment.

Both companies are based in Germany, and SponsorPay says each company will retain its original branding, staff, and management team. However, the groups will share their resources and advertising base, with the goal of the team-up to ensure "sustainable monetization."

The two companies have had quick roads to success; each was founded last year. The companies' strategies have revolved around generating higher-than-average advertising revenue by focusing on country-specific localization throughout Europe. In a statement, the marketing manager of casual game publisher Cafe.com, which uses SponsorPay's services, said advertising revenue was higher than with U.S.-based monetizers.

"SponsorPay has by far the most Facebook-compliant offers, perfectly translated and relevant for Europe," he said. "Since integrating SponsorPay we have experienced a very impressive and unexpected revenue increase, compared to the revenue generated by US providers."

Said SponsorPay CEO of the acquisition, "Between our two companies, we already serve the majority of Europe's top 10 publishers of online and social games. Bringing the two platforms together will enable us to offer both publishers and advertisers an exceedingly attractive portfolio."

The terms of this week's deal were not revealed

"Solid" sales of the flight-based MMORPG Aion and a "revitalized" Lineage franchise led Seoul, South Korea-based NCsoft to post record profits for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended December 30.

NCsoft profits for the quarter were KRW71.22 billion ($61.26 million), up over 1,000 percent year-on-year. Sales were up 99 percent year-on-year to KRW197.28 billion ($170.13 million).

The PC-focused online game maker released Aion in South Korea in November 2008, with the title appearing in Western territories in September last year. NCsoft previously expressed hope that the game would be second in the U.S. only to World of Warcraft.

Initial uptake of the game was strong in North America and Europe, with the game selling 970,000 boxed units in its opening days across the two territories.

During the quarter, Aion accounted for 48 percent of the sales. Lineage 1 followed with 27 percent of total sales, and Lineage 2 was next with 20 percent of total sales.

The Lineage series has been a reliable money-maker for NCsoft, primarily in the East. The original was introduced in 1998.

For the fiscal year, NCsoft posted profits of KRW185.39 billion ($159.86 million), a year-on-year rise of 623 percent. Sales rose 83 percent to KRW634.74 billion ($547.33 million). Aion captured 43 percent of annual sales; Lineage 2 26 percent; and Lineage 1 23 percent.

NCsoft's rebound is a welcome return to form for the company, as the firm's big MMORPG release from the previous fiscal year, Tabula Rasa, failed to gain traction with audiences and ultimately shut down just over a year after release. NCsoft CFO Jaeho Lee said in August last year that he wanted to "erase that memory [of Tabula Rasa] from our performance."

NCsoft, which publishes the City of Heroes franchise, is readying another major MMORPG with Guild Wars 2, reportedly slated for 2011.

Social game developer Zynga is set to buy up fellow Facebook game developer Serious Business, and move all its employees to its San Francisco headquarters.

"We’re very excited to gain an experienced team that is committed to building social games," says Zynga chief operating officer Vish Makhijani of venture-backed Serious Business, best known for Friends For Sale on Facebook -- a game which presently claims more than 5 million monthly active users. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Adds Makhijani: "We are impressed with Serious Business’ entrepreneurial attitude, speed, and innovation in developing social games and welcome them to our team."

Zynga, developer of FarmVille, Mafia Wars and other popular social network games, currently boasts 60 million active users, and says that Serious Business' innovations will be useful in improving the games it serves.

Zynga has seen explosive growth in recent years, as one of the top three social gaming companies along with EA-acquired Playfish and Sorority Life creator Playdom. Late in 2009, Zynga picked up $180 million in investment toward its further growth.

Following his company's acquisition by EA, Playfish boss Kristian Segerstrale said that he sees the social gaming space rapidly maturing, and that consolidation among companies developing games for networks like Facebook looked likely to be a major part of that evolution.

Microsoft is one of multiple companies considering acquiring social game developer CrowdStar, creator of Happy Aquarium and Happy Island, according to reports that emerged today.

Citing anonymous sources said to be close to the matter, Bloomberg reports CrowdStar has not yet decided to pursue an acquisition; the privately-held company may instead look to obtain more non-controlling venture capital investment.

Burlingame, California-based CrowdStar is one of the most popular application developers on Facebook, with tracking site AppData listing it as having the fourth-highest monthly active user count, just after Facebook itself -- and just ahead of Electronic Arts, which recently acquired rival social developer Playfish.

CrowdStar has seen extremely rapid growth. It is a younger company than any of the other top six Facebook developers, having been founded in 2008 and only having publicly emerged from "stealth mode" last November.

EA acquired Playfish for $300 million to $400 million, depending on performance milestones; Bloomberg reports CrowdStar is valued in the $200 million neighborhood.

Microsoft has operated an online casual gaming portal, now known as MSN Games, since 1996. It has evolved to serve various purposes; at times it included matchmaking features for a number of core games. Most recently, Microsoft signaled its intention to introduce social gaming to MSN Games by partnering with Zynga, the number one Facebook game developer, to host FarmVille, the number one Facebook game.

As the March 9th-13th event -- including the WiM-relevant Social & Online Games Summit approaches, GDC 2010 organizers have revealed new lectures on Deus Ex 3's "cyberpunk renaissance" look, Silent Hill producer Akira Yamaoka's ethos, and Batman: Arkham Asylum's art direction.

The new announcements come with less than a month to go until the event, which takes place from March 9th to 13th at San Francisco's Moscone Center, and includes two days of Summits and tutorials alongside three days of Main Conference content.

A pair of particularly intriguing new lectures lead the new line-up announcements. Firstly, Eidos Montreal art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete presents a lecture on "The Successes and Failures of Creating a Near-Future Cyberpunk Setting with a Renaissance Twist in Deus Ex 3", providing some of the first concrete information about the much-awaited title.

Jacques-Belletete "...will discuss the creative underpinnings behind the unique blend of art style that combines the past, present and future in the next evolution of the Deus Ex franchise", with particular reference to the title's "Cyber Renaissance" look, which "is infused across the fashion, characters, environments and story."

Secondly, veteran Silent Hill composer and recent series producer Akira Yamaoka, who has just joined No More Heroes creator Grasshopper Manufacture, will present a lecture entitled "As Long as the Audio is Fun, the Game Will Be Too".

This retrospective, taken from Yamaoka's "first 20 years in video game production", will present an interesting angle: "People tend not to think about game design and audio design in parallel. I will present my views on audio design in games from a producer's perspective, having had experience in both roles. With few technological limits remaining, we can focus on achieving realism and interaction. What challenges remain in audio design?"

In addition, as part of a series of GDC 2010 Track keynotes just confirmed, including already-revealed lectures from Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto and on StarCraft II's programming approach, a number of major new lectures have been revealed, including the following:

A new fund maintained by Redpoint Ventures will focus on investments in services that "accelerate the innovation" of social and mobile internet services, as well as the cloud computing and clean technology sectors.

The $400 million fund will be called "Redpoint IV." Although the announcement made no explicit mention of online and social games, the increasing presence of games in those areas is likely to drive a considerable amount of their innovation in the coming years. One past recipient of Redpoint funding is Gaia Online, a forum-based community that has crossed over into social games to various extents.

"This latest Redpoint fund will help entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams in a world of promising opportunity, and signals an exciting period for early stage investing over the next five years,” said Geoff Yang, a founding partner of the Menlo Park-based firm, in a statement.

"We continue to find entrepreneurs who have brilliant ideas and an increasingly strong desire to change the world," he said. "We are committed to invest in those entrepreneurs, to stand behind their ideas and to help them achieve their goals."

IMVU, an avatar-based social network and virtual world, wants to make it easier for its users to go on virtual (and eventually real) dates. It's partnering with Zoosk, an online dating site that plugs into existing social networks, which will allow the two companies to mutually grow their user bases and widen their breadth of social services.

Users can join Zoosk from within IMVU by way of IMVU's new "Dating" section, at which point they can create their own dating profile.

IMVU traditionally operates by way of a virtual good monetization model, while Zoosk offers an optional premium subscription service.

IMVU business development VP Kevin Dasch says the dating integration makes sense given the site's existing demographics.

"The majority of IMVU members are over 18 -- in fact, the average age is 22," he said in a statement. "We wanted to partner with a leading dating service to give them a way to meet people offline. Our partnership with Zoosk affords both companies the opportunity to grow our membership bases and to increase the range of service we provide to our adults."

Still, he added, "We will not expose the dating service to our teen members."

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 2K Marin, Foundation 9 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:

38 Studios: Game Designer
"Would you like to become part of the team that includes the creative visionaries behind Drizzt Do’Urden and Spawn? 38 Studios is currently seeking a Game Designer to join our Design department. This is a full-time position with competitive salary, full benefits and 401(k), and the chance to be part of online gaming history!."

Foundation 9 Entertainment: Marketing Director
"This Marketing leader will provide Marketing and brand management leadership for Foundation 9 Entertainment Studios and serve as the primary Marketing advisor for Studio leaders. S/he will take an active part in developing strategic corporate and studio marketing plans that will enhance F9E’s its market position and brand value within the traditional video game market. The Director will also help F9E grow into new markets."