Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment has sold Stargate Resistance, its assets and upkeep to a new studio, Fresh Start, as it struggles to keep the PC shooter afloat in the face of its apparently insurmountable bankruptcy.

The company says Fresh Start Studio, which has now assumed support and operating costs for Stargate Resistance, was itself established by "concerned shareholders" of Cheyenne Mountain who "have taken this step in an effort to preserve the game and prevent it from going offline because they felt there was no other alternative." Fresh Start paid Cheyenne Mountain $100,000 for the game, and put $200,000 towards its development, the company said.

The studio filed for Chapter 11 in February of this year, and in a memo to shareholders, confirmed it has ceased all game development, laid off its employees, and is vacating its offices completely, as it owes some $35,000 in back rent.

According to the memo, the company has only $10,000 in its bank accounts, and it "may" owe at least $2 million to creditors, if not more, while it owes $1.1 million in unpaid wages to its employees since March 2009. Finally, it owes $3 million in Federal and State payroll taxes.

88 percent of gamers surveyed have bought virtual content, says a study from DFC Intelligence, in partnership with monetization platform company Live Gamer.

Research firm DFC and Live Gamer studied some 5,000 gamers in North America and Europe during the first two months of 2010, and included seven years of Live Gamer's historical data from around the world.

According to the survey, "digital content" also includes music, movies and games, and isn't limited to virtual goods bought through microtransactions, as players can do in popular Western social games like FarmVille on Facebook or Sony Online Entertainment's family-friendly Free Realms MMO.

60 percent of the respondents who said they'd bought something, however, said the content they paid for was an in-game item, not a full game. "In most cases, the digital items are offered in free-to-play products, which are low risk for the consumer," says DFC analyst David Cole.

DFC's report draws a distinction between "large commercial massively multiplayer online games", which are large in size, high in production value, and charge subscription fees -- presumably like World of Warcraft -- and what the firm calls "MMOG Lite", which provide persistent worlds and character-building gameplay without the same kind of cost investment.

DFC says the "MMOG Lite" category, which presumably includes games like Free Realms, RuneScape and MapleStory, was worth $800 million in 2009 -- and will top $3 billion by 2015.

"Korea still has the highest current revenue and longest history of all the markets we studied," says Cole. "However, when looking at seven years of actual historical transactional data, it is clear markets like Germany, Japan and the U.S. are not only trending towards Korea, but doing so at a significantly higher spend per transaction," said Cole.

DFC says the stats on adoption of virtual content purchases bode well for virtual item models for other game genres that can "benefit from growing consumer acceptance of digital items."

Says DFC analyst Jeremy Miller: "Furthermore, the success of social networks like Facebook show the popularity of virtual items can extend far beyond games."

Quepasa Corporation, creator of Latino social network Quepasa.com, has partnered with virtual goods and applications company Viximo to bring the firm's social games to its 12 million users.

Quepasa.com offers social features, games, contests, and multimedia content in English, Spanish, and Portugese. The tri-lingual site will use its OpenSocial framework to integrate social games and applications as their added to Viximo's portfolio in order to keep users engaged and bring in more revenue for Quepasa.

Viximo specializes in working with social networks and content providers to "create a virtual economy in only one week." The company says in that short amount of time, it can implement a virtual goods business with microtransaction payments, analytics, virtual currency, and white label social apps and games.

One of Viximo's featured titles that will appear on Queapsa.com is SnapMeUp, a combination of online flirting and social gaming. Players, buy, sell, and trade photos of their friends with others on the site. SnapMeUp allows some to "become tycoons by mastering the art of buy low/sell high" as others "find validation as the hottest person on the market."

"We anticipate SnapMeUp will be a highly engaging application for Quepasa.com members and expect the competitive spirit of our Latino community will drive usage and demand for the social game," says Quepasa CEO John Abbott. "Our partnership with Viximo demonstrates Quepasa's commitment to bringing entertaining, authentic and up-to-date content to our dedicated community."

Social payments platform Jambool announced that it's appointed Mike Quigley, formerly vice president of global marketing at Electronic Arts's EA Games label, as its chief marketing officer.

Based in San Francisco, Jambool was founded in 2006 by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein. The startup launched Social Gold, an online payments and virtual currency platform for free-to-play MMOs, virtual worlds, casual online games, and social games/applications, last October. Its partners include Miniclip.com, Gamersafe, and Ohai.

Quigley worked at Electronic Arts for ten years in various management positions in marketing, working on popular video game franchises such as The Sims, Need For Speed, Battlefield, and Rock Band. Prior to that, he worked in brand management at Disney for five years on IPs like Snow White, Aladdin, and Lion King.

The marketer's switch to Jambool follows several other recent moves EA executives have made to the social space. Two weeks ago, EA Sports's senior vice president and group general manager Steven Chiang, who put in 15 years at the company, left to join Zynga (FarmVille) as the president of its development studios.

And last November, Mitali Pattnaik, who was head of marketing at EA's social games division, where she headed up the launch of The Sims 3's online virtual goods store, jumped ship to serve as general manager for Diner Dash and Chocolatier developer PlayFirst.

"I had an inkling for a long time about joining a startup with a small team," said Quigley in an interview with VC news site VentureBeat.. "My goal is to get more game developers to use our payment platform and build the Social Gold brand."

Online game publisher/operator IGG (Lords Online, Tales of Pirates) announced Moonlight Online, a new 3D massively multiplayer online game featuring warring vampires, werewolves and likely other elements that will quickly catch the attention of The Twilight Saga fans.

Despite its similarity in themes to Stephenie Meyer's novels and films, Moonlight looks to focus less on adolescent romance and more on giving players superpowers that allow for "the demolition and creation of entire worlds". Gamers will have gravity-defying abilities such as the power to fly, scale vertical cliffs, and even leap from one from one skyscraper to another.

The supernatural game, which IGG says uses a "cutting-edge game engine", takes place in an apocalyptic universe and will feature strategy elements, such as the power to "build and destroy empires among the war-torn worlds". The publisher believes Moonlight Online is a versatile title that will appeal to a wide variety of gamers.

IGG plans to release Moonlight Online at the end of 2010. It plans to release another free-to-play 3D MMORPG, Tales of Fantasy (no relation to Namco Bandai's Tales series), a fantasy game in which players fight for and defend two factions at war, later this year.

[Researcher and digital media professor Celia Pearce reflects on the closing of Makena's There.com, chronicling the rich culture found there and the ingredients for an enduring virtual community.]

This week marks the passing of yet another virtual world. There.com was one of the early “second wave” metaverse-style offerings (the first wave was in the mid-1990s), an open-ended social world with user-created content. Born in 2003, the same year as Second Life, There.com was one of the more successful and enduring virtual worlds, with one of the most cohesive long-standing communities of any of its competitors.

I began doing research in There.com in 2004 with a study of refugees from the defunct game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, chronicled in my 2009 book, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (MIT). I’ve also conduced a number of other research projects in There.com, one of which was in progress at its closing.

There.com is often compared to Second Life, its better-publicized competitor, but There.com attracted a different audience, and hence, a unique community emerged over its seven-year lifespan. There.com aimed to appeal to the “everyday person,” a broad, relatively low-tech audience, in contrast to the early adopter geek who often dominates massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds.

While Second Life has enjoyed widespread appeal, it is very much born of the Burning Man culture, both in terms of its aesthetics and the cultural cache of technical prowess. But There.com was designed with a different audience in mind that also spanned older adults, women and ‘tweens, as well as the twenty-somethings who are the standard staple of the genre.

Although Major League Baseball all-star pitcher Curt Schilling retired from the Red Sox last year, he is apparently unable to leave his competitive mentality on the mound. The former pro athlete has invested millions of dollars and sacrificed time with his family to establish the Maynard, Massachusetts-based MMORPG company, 38 Studios.

"I have put the majority of the money I've earned in my life on the table," he said in the Harvard Business School case study, Curt Schilling's Next Pitch. "If I make another financial investment, I will have crossed the point of no return from a personal investment and company standpoint."

Baseball Reference, which is cited in the case study, estimates that Schilling earned over $114.16 million during his career in baseball.

Schilling is a known MMORPG fanatic and an avid player of games including Blizzard's World of Warcraft and Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest. Originally announced in 2006 as Green Monster Games, named after towering left field wall at Boston's Fenway Park, 38 Studios stems from Schilling's passion for gaming, which is second only to baseball.

Fast Lessons In Business

But starting a company and creating a game is a lot different than playing WoW, or baseball for that matter, he quickly found out. "It was a very boring work environment in which you are asking people to be inspired," he said after visits to SOE. His research into the development of MMORPGs initially involved going to development studios, observing the process and taking notes.

After injecting an initial $5 million into the company (without informing his wife, Shonda), Schilling announced Green Monster Games and revealed the hiring of sci-fi/fantasy writer R.A. Salvatore and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane. Other key hires included industry vet Brett Close as CEO (who left the company last year) and former Comcast gaming exec Jen MacLean.

Mobile community Mig33 says its efforts to transform the mobile chat community into a "full-fledged mobile social entertainment service" and lay the foundation for a thriving virtual economy have been successful in increasing its average revenue per paying user (ARPU) and popularizing virtual gifts on its service.

The company has based its social entertainment initiatives -- which includes the launch of social games, user-owned groups, virtual gifting, and avatars -- on Chinese instant messaging tool Tencent QQ. While QQ has thrived in China, Mig33 focuses on developing mobile markets like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya, Bosnia, and others.

Claiming more than 40 million registered users, the firm says its ARPU in countries like Indonesia and India has grown to over $1/month since focusing on its social entertainment model. Mig33's community now sends over 1 million virtual gifts a month, posting 100 million messages a day on its network (compared to Twitter's 50 million tweets per day).

The service, which is available on more than 2,000 handsets across over 200 countries, launched avatars last month and allows users to customize personal characters. Mig33 notes that the sale of avatars is the primary source of revenue for QQ and other mobile social networks.

"Delivering avatars to our users is the latest step in a long string of initiatives to broaden our proposition to our markets, and in the march to become QQ for the rest of the world," says mig33 CEO and founder Steven Goh. "Our unique combination of services and payment model, is delivering ARPU's as high as a few dollars per paying user from some of the least developed part of the world without ourselves having to maintain a physical presence."

"It's significant that not only are these results comparable to many of the successful Social Entertainment Services in East Asia and North America, we're achieving these results from some of the least developed countries in the world and where average incomes are in the mere hundreds of dollars per month. These countries include Indonesia, India, Kenya, Bosnia, and many others."

PlayFirst is best known for its Diner Dash series of casual games -- and its focus on downloadable PC games. But the market is fast changing, and the lines are blurring. CEO Mari Baker speaks to Gamasutra about how the company views this changing market and how it plans to react to these trends.

"We are committed to the audience that we have traditionally served," said Baker. However, she said, "we believe the historic definition of casual games is somewhat either irrelevant or expanded -- however you want to look at it -- in the new world."

While we shouldn't expect PlayFirst to make a "hard shift" to target male teens, "the Dash series has proven to cross genders in its interest level," said Baker, which explains why it made the journey to 360 and PS3. When games make the journey in 2010, said Baker, PlayFirst will "really [be] re-imagining them as we bring them to new platforms... really being native to those platforms."

While social networking and iPhone are growth targets for PlayFirst, its core PC download business is not to be ignored. "We sold more units in 2009 in the PC download than we had the prior year, so we think that there's still a lot of growth and opportunity there," said Baker. However, she said, "There has been a lot of price compression over the last 18 months, which has made some of the dynamics of that business potentially challenging."

The problem is, she said, "as the price points continue to drop, it starts to become very difficult to maintain your standards of excellence as the revenues that you're getting really fall quite precipitously. That's where we're trying to realign in the organization." Baker also pointed out that, thanks to its Playground development SDK which allows for easy multiplatform development, the company remains "very committed" to releasing games on the Mac, which has "performed very well for us."

Emergent Game Technologies, the company behind the Gamebryo engine, said Tuesday that it licensed the tech to Korea's EYA Soft for use in the free-to-play 3D MMORPG, Iris Online.

Iris has been in open beta since February this year. Gala-Net will publish the game in North America on the company's gPotato game portal late this year, Emergent said in a press statement.

The game is billed as a "fully-featured MMORPG" with dungeons, PvP, monster summons and a cute art style.

Just last week, Emergent announced two more Gamebryo licensing agreements with Shanghai-based Goldcool and Seoul-based JoyMaster Interactive, both of which are working on online role-playing games.

FarmVille developer Zynga is distributing an online survey indicating an intention to launch an umbrella site where the studio will host its social games outside of Facebook, where it will offer exclusive features, faster performance, fewer glitches, and more. The company is seeking feedback on what to name this potential hub.

The survey, which was spotted by fansite FarmVille Freak, asks respondents to picture a single site where they could play Mafia Wars, Cafe World, and other Zynga titles that are currently available through Facebook. That section of the form reads:

"Imagine a place where you can play all your favorite Zynga games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Café World and others. This would be a place where you could play games:

- that are always free
- without losing any of the friends or game history you have already built up
- that allow you to earn rewards faster and have them apply across all Zynga games
- with faster performance and fewer glitches
- where accepting gifts or neighbor requests is quick and easy
- where helping friends or asking for help is easy to do
- that allow you to see game-relevant feeds & posts in one place
- that have a substantially larger game playing area
- that allow you to trade items with friends
- that show how you compare against your friends and other players
- that provide exclusive game features
- that let you receive and share tips with other players"

Zynga has made several moves to extend at least one of its titles, FarmVille, the most popular application on Facebook with 82.4 million monthly active users, beyond the social network. Last year, it launched FarmVille.com, a standalone site for the farming sim. Then in February, the developer made the game available through Microsoft's MSN Games portal.

Those implementations of FarmVille outside of Facebook still interact with users and pull data from the social network through Facebook Connect APIs . Presumably, Zygna's games hosted at this potential umbrella site would work the same way.

Social game developer Lolapps has partnered with Social Gold, the virtual goods monetization platform operated by Jambool, to power payments across its Facebook games and applications, starting with its Band of Heroes and Diva Life.

The Social Gold platform allows developers to create and manage their own white-label virtual currency, offer in-game payments, and optimize their virtual economy using analytics. Apps that have integrated the platform can provide an online wallet designed to drive repeat purchases from players, too.

Founded in 2008, Lolapps has more than 200 applications available on Facebook, including social games, quiz applications, and virtual gift services. Its titles, which include Yakuza Lords and Who Is Ur Celeb Twin?, have brought in more than 40 million monthly active users.

Lolapps has also worked on a couple Facebook adaptations of popular video game console and PC releases, such as Champions Online by Cryptic Studios/Atari and Dante's Inferno by Visceral Games/Electronic Arts, with social features.

"This partnership enables us to accelerate monetization for the fastest growing social gaming company," says Social Gold CEO and founder Vikas Gupta. "Social Gold provides a secure and scalable payments processing platform, so Lolapps can easily and effectively monetize all of their games and apps, and enable purchases across a wide range of currencies and payment methods in local and international markets."

Social gaming company Playdom is continuing to make strides in Argentina. The company, which just invested $5 million into Buenos Aires-based Metrogames, today announced it has acquired Argentinian developer Three Melons.

Three Melons, a studio of about 45 developers, is a longtime advergame creator and developer of soccer-based Facebook game Bola!, which claims 145,000 daily active users.

Bola! is Three Melons' first original title, but the developer says it's created over 50 games as a third-party. Part of the allure in the acquisition is thought to be the company's proprietary internal tech, although it also boasts early adoption of tools like Unity 3D.

"We are thrilled to join forces with Playdom," says Mariano Suarez Battan, CEO of Three Melons. "The company has positioned itself for success in 2010 and we look forward to working as a team to deliver on that goal."

Since receiving $43 million in Series A funding last November, Playdom has opened its wallet to fund "aggressive plans to expand [its] social gaming footprint in 2010", including its acquisitions of Green Patch (Lil Green Patch), Trippert Labs (Fighter Jets), and most recently Offbeat Creations (Super Farkle).

"We admire the Three Melons team and welcome their quality talent to the Playdom family," says Playdom CEO John Pleasants.

3D social game developer Hangout Industries raised $2 million in additional equity financing from existing backers, and says it's currently in discussions to secure $3 million more from new investors, too.

Headquartered in Boston (with an office in Los Angeles) and founded in March 2007, Hangout Industries is working on a social gaming platform that runs on Facebook and other social networks. It raised $6 million from VC firms Highland Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners three years ago. It then raised $4 million last June, which brings its total amount of financing up to $12 million so far.

The company runs Fashion City, a social game that recently launched in Beta form on Facebook. Targeting teenage girls, the game invites players to create, customize, and dress a fashion model avatar, build a fashion empire, and hangout with friends in its 3D world. Players can buy new outfits after earning in-game cash through minigames or purchasing virtual currency with real money.

Fashion City currently has around 316,000 monthly active players and 22,000 daily active players. Hangout's AppData listing also hints at another title named Hangout Hoops, which is described as "the first ever truly 3D basketball game to come to Facebook".

"We took the $2 million from insiders as a prelude," said CEO Pano Anthos, according to a report from Mass High Tech. Although he didn't specify how his company will spend its new funding, Anthos said it won't go towards staffing up: "That’s not where the next level of growth is. It’s really around distribution.”

Munich-headquartered mobile social gaming infrastructure provider Scoreloop released new monetization tools in its updated Core Social SDK, adding support for downloadable content and in-game currencies, which developers can now integrate into their mobile titles.

Capitalizing on the popularity of the free-to-play/"freemium" model, Scoreloop offers the mobile infrastructure and implementation services needed for features designed to increase user engagement and monetize downloadable content (e.g. decorative themes and virtual content that players can share with their friends) in free games.

The new version of the Core Social SDK, which is available starting today, is "white-label and customizable for direct integration into a game's existing user interface." The SDK is available for integration on multiple mobile platforms, including iPhone and Android.

Scoreloop highlighted two App Store titles that take advantage of the updated SDK's new features: Tag Games's Astro Ranch and FDG Entertainment's Parachute Panic HD, the latter of which is for both iPhone and iPad (releasing when Apple launched the new tablet device on April 3rd).

"We are absolutely thrilled by the feedback coming in from the first developers with early access to our new SDK," says Scoreloop CEO Marc Gumpinger. "This is exactly what they have been looking for: a set of creative tools that improve the visibility of their games, connect their users for increased engagement and drive revenues through exposure to millions of users. All under their control, without giving up their most precious asset -- the users -- to a branded and closed platform."

Niko Partners forecasts that the Chinese online game market will reach $9.2 billion by 2014, driven by social networking sites and expanding infrastructure.

The San Jose, CA-based research firm predicted that this year, online gaming in China will reach $4.5 billion. 2009 saw revenues of $3.57 billion.

"While the global economic downturn hurt video game publishers in much of the world, China’s online game industry reflected no pain in 2009 and gamers continued to embrace online games as the best inexpensive source of social entertainment available," said Lisa Cosmas Hanson, managing partner of Niko Partners.

She added, "While the era of online gaming is generating lots of interest and growth opportunity in the West, China is one of the countries where online gaming is a well established market segment that extends its reach to more and more Chinese consumers every year."

The report also said that the Chinese gaming market grew and continues to grow "despite a harsh regulatory environment particularly for foreign games, and a gamer base that has become increasingly discerning about game quality."

Niko Partners said there were 68 million online gamers in China at the end of 2009. That number will grow to 141 million by 2014, the firm said.

The company's latest annual review of video games in the region also said that Chinese gamers prefer the free-to-play model, in which game makers derive revenues from users' virtual item purchases.

In addition, the survey found that 63 percent of gamers increased their spending on online games in the past year, and 88 percent of gamers surveyed play games on social networks.

Niko Partners noted the strong social aspect tied to China's internet cafes. Even gamers with PCs at home often visit these locations to meet up with friends. "At least 65 percent of gamers use internet cafes at least part of the time," Niko Partners said.

Former Free Radical execs David Doak and Steve Ellis have founded social gaming studio ZinkyZonk -- and the pair has received a £50,000 ($76,110) investment to develop GangstaPets, a new Facebook game.

UK trade site Develop reports that a regional investment body, the East Midlands Development Agency has provided the grant to the pair, and that GangstaPets will be cut from a similar cloth as hit titles Mafia Wars and FarmVille.

Free Radical, developer of Haze and TimeSplitters, was dissolved late in 2008, although founder Doak was believed to have left the company prior to the closure.

Free Radical was later acquired by German developer Crytek, and another founder, Karl Hilton, heads the studio under the name Crytek UK.

Develop's report also says Doak and Ellis formed ZinkyZonk during 2009, but GangstaPets is the first title announcement to emerge from the studio's quiet founding.

Though the wackiness of the company's name and project might make this sound like an April Fools' Day joke, note that GangstaPets has been operational on Facebook for more than a month now, and EM Media lists the game as a currently funded project on its site.

San Francisco-based developer Vivaty will shut down its free 3D virtual spaces service next month after running out of cash and less than expected sales for its Vivabux virtual currency.

"As one who has spent years making Vivaty a reality and then trying to make it a success, it pains me to announce that as of Friday the 16th of April, Vivaty.com will completely shut down," said Vivaty co-founder and CTO Jay Weber in a post on the company's blog. "I apologize to our loyal users that this must be so."

Founded in 2007, Vivaty offers a platform for 3D virtual rooms that users could decorate, inhabit with customizable avatars, and invite friends to for chat/activities. The 3D scenes are embeddable not only in Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger, but also on blogs and websites.

The company received more than $9 million in funding from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers several years ago, but Weber described Vivaty as a "rather expensive site to run" and said the developer has been running out of money for some time.

Vivaty based its business model on hopes that Vivabux, its virtual currency launched last November for purchasing goods and services within its 3D spaces, would carry the company into profitability, but the CTO revealed that Vivabux sales have "never come close to covering [its] costs".

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced that it has doubled its investment in the iFund program to promote the development of innovative applications -- including games -- for Apple's upcoming iPad.

The $100 million iFund was introduced in March of 2008 to encourage developers to create applications for Apple's iPhone. The iFund currently promotes 14 ventures, including prominent App Store publisher ngmoco and social games pioneer Zynga.

At an event held yesterday in Menlo Park, California, Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr revealed that the company will double its iFund investment to $200 million, in anticipation of the iPad's U.S. launch on April 3rd.

More than 20 iPad applications are backed by the iFund, 11 of which will debut in Apple's App Store on the iPad's first day of release. ngmoco will publish 7 iPad launch titles, with an enhanced version of its social village sim We Rule currently in development.

In remarks reported on by TechCrunch from the event, ngmoco CEO Neil Young noted that the company saw significant growth thanks to initial iFund support. According to Young, ngmoco's games have been downloaded more than 30 million times, and its users collectively play over 20 million minutes of ngmoco games every day.

To date, iFund-supported applications have been downloaded more than 100 million times from the iTunes App Store.

Chinese MMO developer Suzhou Snail Electronic Co. (Snail Game) opened a new U.S. office, Snail Games USA, which will serve as the company's regional headquarters for North America and Latin America. The Los Angeles-based studio named online gaming industry veteran Scott Miller as its CEO.

The new 15,000 square-foot facility will oversee the company's MMO/free-to-play game development, licensing, marketing, operations, and community management in the area. Snail Games USA's opening follows the recent establishment of another international branch by its parent company in Moscow, Russia.

Founded in 2000 and based in Suzhou, China, Snail Game has developed a number of titles currently distributed worldwide, including 5 Street, Age of Armor, Voyage Century and Heroes of Gaia. Snail Games USA's first announced title it's chosen to publish is Heroes of Gaia, which the company notes reached a userbase of more than 1 million players in just a few months after launching.

Snail Games USA's CEO Scott Miller, who most recently was chief operating officer at mobile gaming/networking firm MojoBaby, says the new branch has "a full pipeline of games" scheduled to launch in North American and Latin American markets in 2010-2011.

"With the rapidly growing number of Snail Games customers in the North American and Latin American markets, Snail Games is making a major commitment to support and service our gamers in this region," says Miller. "Our offices in Los Angeles will provide an efficient and convenient base of operations for us and our partners in the Americas."

Pointing out a retail channel typically ignored by most online game companies, prepaid card distributor InComm says its gaming category sales at pharmacies grew more than 200 percent year-to-date compared to the same period of time in 2009.

InComm's Gaming Team attributes this increase in sales to the convenience of neighborhood drug stores, changing demographics in the pharmacy channel, and "unique and incremental fixtures executed to raise awareness of the gaming category". The company argues that with more than 19,000 locations, chain drug stares are becoming a regular top 10 destination for consumers looking for prepaid game cards.

The prepaid cards are an alternative payment method for younger gamers who want to purchase virtual goods in their favorite online titles but don't have a credit card. InComm says that by offering prepaid cards, pharmacies remind kids and their parents to pick up gaming cards while they're shopping for other items at the drug store.

Min Kim, vice president at MapleStory publisher Nexon America, has seen "tremendous" growth in prepaid cad sales from the pharmacy channel, especially since the second half in 2009. He notes that pharmacies are also starting to emphasize the cards with increased placement and heightened visibility, which Kim believes will lead to some of Nexon America's top sales this year.

"In the first quarter alone, InComm Gaming has seen a 100 percent adoption rate across the drug channel—up from 62% last year," says InComm's SVP of Consumer Products and International Brian Parlotto. "We are taking every opportunity to strengthen our retail relationships by introducing the new and exciting gaming products that are rapidly capturing the attention of so many retailers and consumers."

He continues, "In addition, we have been able to maximize our marketing efforts in tandem with these retail partners while leveraging our expertise within the gaming category. Our efforts have lead to dramatic growth for the gaming category at chain drug and have helped drive new customers to these stores."

Independent Flash-based MMO developer Tiny Speck, founded by creators of popular photo sharing site Flickr, has raised $5 million in series A funding for its upcoming browser-based online game Glitch.

Founded by Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, Tiny Speck is primarily staffed by a small team of developers in San Francisco and Vancouver. The company announced its plans earlier this year, and hopes to release its debut 2D sidescrolling game in late 2010.

Adding to its initial $1.5 million in funding, Tiny Speck's latest round was led by venture capital funds Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, according to a GigaOM report. Along with its investment, Accel will add its own Andrew Braccia to the developer's board of directors.

Butterfield told GigaOM that his company plans to use the new capital to bolster its activity in both of Tiny Speck's locations, as its Vancouver office concentrates on the creative side of the game and San Francisco focus on the technical side.

Glitch has been described by its creators as a "massively-multiplayer game playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web."

It 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."

Online game monetization platform PlaySpan revealed a partnership with Spil Games to provide users of the casual gaming portal network the ability to purchase premium content through PlaySpan's Digital Goods Monetization 2.0 Platform and UltimatePay service.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, Spil provides online casual games through 45 game sites localized in 17 languages worldwide, reaching over 115 million visitors each months. Under its new agreement with PlaySpan, the developer can allow players to buy virtual goods and in-game cash for free-to-play casual titles in their local currency using one of 85 global payment methods.

PlaySpan recognizes that while the free-to-play model has enjoyed much popularity in the social gaming space, online casual games haven't enjoyed the same success. The firm's chief executive Karl Mehta argued, "So far casual games have not adopted the virtual economy model correctly for mass audience casual games. Spil Games and PlaySpan will be the first to bring this new capability to the mass market."

"Casual games have been monetized primarily through advertising and/or paid download leveraging the 'try before you buy' model," PlaySpan's CEO explained to WorldsInMotion. "For the first time, PlaySpan’s platform provides the free-to-play/pay-for-stuff model with a 'cross-game' microtransaction capability."

The company, which offers an Ultimate Game Card product with support for more than a thousand online games, recently commented on the "brisk adoption and usage of prepaid cards". PlaySpan believes that rapid growth will extend to consumers looking for an alternate payment method to buy digital goods in casual games, too.

"Pre-paid cards have great appeal for casual game players as well," said Mehta. "There is a huge youth demographic and large segment of female players who prefer to play and pay with pre-paid cards."

The CEO also commented on his company's own recent growth: "PlaySpan is growing rapidly worldwide and is driven by the adoption of our platform by the top publishers and platform providers in every category. Recent partnership announcements with Adobe and Changyou are just a few examples of over 1000+ games and platforms sites PlaySpan powers."

"Our publisher and platform partners also benefit from PlaySpan’s 'network effect' as a common monetization platform to help publishers and developers monetize at a higher ARPU (average revenue per user) with more paid users with lower fraud rates," Mehta added.

Sony Online Entertainment's free-to-play MMO adventure game Free Realms has surpassed over 10 million registered users since its launch in April 2009. The online game developer will celebrate Free Realms's first birthday and this milestone with a month-long in-game celebration.

When the family-friendly MMO hit the 9 million user mark just last month, SOE partially attributed the title's success to its continuous development of new features and themed in-game events. Free Realms offers a variety of activities and minigames, like virtual pets, kart racing, and a trading card game that can be played with virtual cards or offline with physical card decks sold at stores.

SOE will begin its in-game birthday festivities in mid-April with party decorations around different areas, live community events, two new combat minigames, and party hats and commemorative t-shirts for player avatars. Players will soon see new Rides like rain-bow mane Unicorn, Beetle, and Balloon Animal Pets, as well as Chick and Rabbit Pet Pals, too.

The developer also plans to host a series of 15 birthday quests and a large scale cake fight that will have players helping prevent "the ruin of the Free Realms birthday bash by Cakenstein (pictured), a colossal monster made from cake recipes gone wrong."

Ahead of those festivities, SOE is running a Double Station Cash Weekend promotion, in which players can purchase Station Cash prepaid cards from select retailers this weekend to receive double their value of Station Cash (in-game currency for buying virtual goods or upgrading to Membership status in the games).

"Reaching 10 million registered players on the eve of Free Realms' first birthday is an incredibly exciting event for SOE and our passionate online community," says SOE president John Smedley. "Millions of gamers have confirmed that the genre we pioneered over 11 years ago with the original EverQuest continues to evolve and expand to include new styles of gameplay that reach a wider audience than ever before."

Mobile game and social platform developer Aurora Feint announced the release of Aurora Feint 3, the latest entry from its free-to-play massively multiplayer online game, to Apple's new iPad device, which formally launches tomorrow.

Aurora Feint 3 integrates OpenFeint, the company's mobile social network implemented in many popular iPhone titles and reaching more than 18 million players. The new game will include standard features like achievements, leaderboards, and challenges but will also be the first game to take advantage of OpenFeint X, which allows players to invite friends to play and buy virtual goods.

As with previous games in the popular Aurora Feint series, this new iPad release combines casual match-three puzzle gameplay with RPG mechanics in a fantasy/magic setting (screenshots after the break). Chapter 1 is already available for free on the App Store, and the developer says it will release future updates that will bring the game to iPhone and iPod touch.

"With Aurora Feint 3 we’ve delivered on two of our core goals: developing a beautiful, multi-chapter MMO for our players and deploying a free-to-play virtual goods-based version of OpenFeint," says Aurora Feint founder and CEO Jason Citron. "This game integrates core components of OpenFeint X and gives us a chance to test and refine these features in a live game before releasing them to the rest of the OpenFeint developer community."

Speaking at MI6, Anita Frazier of consumer-tracking firm NPD Group showed research revealing that nearly one in five people playing some type of video game in March 2010 did at least some of their gaming on a social networking site like Facebook.

The revelation comes as the traditional video game industry moves to capitalize on the growing group of nontraditional gamers.

For example, in November 2009, publishing giant Electronic Arts acquired Playfish for $275 million to establish an even stronger presence in the social network gaming market. At the time, Playfish claimed it reached 50 million active users each month.

While the two groups –- traditional console gamers and social network gamers –- are often considered separate, research by the NPD Group reveals that there is significant overlap between the two.

In particular, 64 percent of people playing video games in the U.S. during the last quarter of 2009 spent at least some of their time on a video game console. However over one third of those console gamers also played a social network game during that same three months.

Viewed from the other perspective, two out of three people playing games on a social network during the end of 2009 also spent some time playing console games.

Frazier's presentation elaborated not only on the growth of social network gaming, but also on the demographics of those gamers. Of the gamers who played only on a social network in the last three months of 2009, 63 percent were female and 37 percent were male. The roles were almost precisely reversed for console-only gamers in the same period, with 38 percent female and 62 percent male.

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 opportunities at Vicarious Visions, WB Games and many 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:

Trion Austin Software Engineer
"Trion World Network (www.trionworld.com) is the publisher and developer of games and original entertainment for a connected world. We have assembled many of the most respected names in the industry – with the backing of the world’s biggest media companies, Time Warner, NBC Universal, Bertelsmann, and of top venture capital firms, Trinity Ventures, DCM, Rustic Canyon – to fulfill the incredible potential that global broadband has created for games. With our innovative technology, we’re combining the best of online, gaming and traditional media to revolutionize the way connected games are designed, developed, and delivered."

WB Games Senior Designer
"The Senior Game Designer is also responsible for ensuring the AI uses the proper scripting logic as well as overseeing the creative design of the AI. He or she must mentor younger technical designers on best practices as well as pinpoint inefficient implementations."