As the company's CEO and chairman Zhu Jun adds the role of president to his responsibilities, Chinese MMO operator and developer The9 Ltd. is pursuing a new development strategy that starts with the restructuring of its business into three divisions.

The Shanghai-based company's three departments will comprise of an online games division, a North American investment division, and a new business division, according to an internal memo reported on by local news site BJBusiness, which was translated by financial markets resource TradingMarkets.

The9's vice presidents He Xudong and Tony Park will lead the online games division and oversee the research, development, and operations of company's titles. Huang Lingdong, also a VP, will concentrate on global investments (e.g. Red 5) as he heads the NA division. And VPs Jiang Huanxin and Chris Shen will help The9 find new business opportunities.

This restructuring comes a month before The9 is scheduled to let its contract with president Xiaowei Chen, leaving CEO and chairman Zhu Jun to take over that position. The company gave no reason for Chen's departure, but it has struggled to match previous financial results since losing its contract to operate World of Warcraft in China last June.

The9 currently operates several MMOs in China such as Soul of the Ultimate Nation, Granado Espada, and FIFA Online 2. It has several projects under development and recently invested around $20 million in Irvine, California-based developer Red 5 Studios.

Social games developer Playdom announced its hiring of David Sobeski, formerly an executive at Yahoo and Microsoft, as its chief technology officer to lead the studio's technology initiatives.

During his time at Yahoo, Sobeski served as senior vice president, managing the company's Open Strategy and Data platform, and helping open its network to third parties and invite social integration features.

Prior to that, he held several general manager positions at Microsoft, where he worked on Windows Vista and Microsoft Exchange Server. He also was development manager on MSN.com, and he contributed to the creation of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine and Internet Explorer.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California (with studios in San Francisco, Seattle, Eugene, Buenos Aires, and South Asia), Playdom produces a variety of games on Facebook and MySpace, such as Sorority Life, Social City, and Mobsters. On Facebook alone, its titles attract more than 37 million monthly active users, according to AppData.

"We are proud to have one of the finest engineering groups in the Valley and after months of searching we've found someone worthy to lead it," says Playdom's CEO John Pleasants. "David brings tremendous value to the company, and we're thrilled to have him on board."

"Through his focus on creating great products for users, his patents and acquisitions, David has been one of the leaders of the technology industry for the past 20 years and we're excited to witness his expertise first-hand."

After testing the social network's waters with releases like My Tribe and Faunasphere, casual games developer Big Fish Games launched Treasure Quest, a new portal featuring eight titles from the studio, on Facebook.

The new portal offers a variety of casual gaming genres that Big Fish has found success with in the downloadable space: hidden object, brain games, match 3, strategy, card games, and riddle games. Looking to repeat that success in the social gaming space, the developer has added a social metagame layer to the portal.

Players create, customize, and dress an avatar that represents them in Treasure Quest's games. As users play games, they earn experience and level up their characters, which rewards them with gold, access to more high-end virtual stores, discounts to stores, "Golds Spins" bonuses, and more.

They can also earn gold and "Quest Complete" stamps by participating in the two quests -- goals to complete in specific games -- the portal offers each day. That gold can be spent on purchasing clothing and accessories for avatars, or extra content (e.g. levels) in Treasure Quest's free-to-play games. Users can buy gold using real money, too.

You can find a trailer for Treasure Quest and descriptions for all of the portal's eight games after the break:

French developer and publisher Ankama Games revealed that its free-to-play and Flash-based massively multiplayer online game Dofus has attracted more than 30 million registered players since its launch in September 2004.

Of those registered players, 3.5 million pay a monthly fee of around €5 ($6.74) for full access to the game's content, the company disclosed at its Ankama Convention in Paris last weekend, according to a report from consumer site Eurogamer. Based on those figures, the French studio brings in some $23.6 million each month from just subscriptions.

The turn-based online strategy game draws an average of one million players each day, peaking at about 250,000 concurrent users. French gamers make up 60 percent of Dofus's audience, and the MMO also has a significant amount of players in French-speaking countries like Belgium, Switzerland and Canada, as well as in Spain and Latin America.

Ankama has made several efforts to strengthen and expand the Dofus franchise, including a 2.0 update and code overhaul last December, a player-versus-player spin-off titled Dofus Arena (currently in Beta, launching on June 21st), and a manga that has so far sold around 800,000 copies.

Developer Zynga says that its popular Facebook game FarmVille has over 32 million daily users and more than 80 million total. Now reports say that the next step in expanding that massive user base is bringing the farming game to other gaming platforms.

"Zynga plans to expand to various mobile platforms," a Zynga spokesperson told social media site Mashable.com. The spokesperson did not offer any further details.

Speculation about new versions of FarmVille originated on sleuthing blog Superannuation. The site noticed that the domain names farmvilleandroid.com, farmvilleipad.com, farmvilleiphone.com and farmvillesms.com were all registered this month by DNStination, the same registrant that holds the official www.farmville.com page.

FarmVille is a free-to-play game in which players take care of crops and animals on a virtual farm. The game, which generates revenue through virtual item buys, debuted in June 2009.

Privately-owned San Francisco-based Zynga is also the developer behind the popular social game Mafia Wars.

Vindicia, an online subscription and microtransaction billing solutions provider, announced the launch of its Hosted Order Automation (HOA) capabilities integrated in its CashBox product.

HOA is designed to allow online merchants to offload Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance to Vindicia while maintaining control over their customers's buying experience. With HOA, those merchants can accept credit cards on their order pages and control customer data without touching a credit card or dealing with PCI regulations. Vindicia points to increasing issues.

Emphasizing the benefits of HOA, Vindicia points to increasing issues associated with storing/managing customer credit card data and maintaining PCI compliance. The company noted a study showing that a typical Level 1 merchant spend a minimum of around $2 million for a system upgrade to meet PCI regulations, as well as $250,000 annually to maintain compliance.

Vindicia has PCI Level 1 Services Provider certification and an SAS 70 Type II audited infrastructure that customers can take advantage of by offloading their PCI burden while still accepting credit cards online. The billing solutions company handles online revenue of more than a billion dollars annually for publishers like Activision Blizzard and Atari.

Social game developer HitGrab, which released titles like MouseHunt and MythMonger on Facebook, has been using Vindicia's Cashbox online billing system and the Hosted Order Automation service for some time now, a decision it says has helped it "stay focused on [its] core competency".

"HOA redefines how online merchants should think through their own PCI compliance efforts," says Vindicia chairman and CEO Gene Hoffman. "By offloading that burden onto CashBox, merchants are now able to reallocate PCI costs into upgrading their products and improving their customers’ online experience."

He continues, "Additionally, companies who have avoided taking credit cards online due to the cost of meeting PCI regulations now have an alternative path to launching new digital business models."

Months after the game appeared online in the form of a closed beta, Electronic Arts studio Phenomic has formally announced the worldwide launch of Lord of Ultima, its free-to-play, browser-based revival of the Ultima series.

Unlike previous entries in the Ultima series, which was originally created by Richard Garriott and debuted in 1981, Lord of Ultima is a strategy game instead of a single-player roleplaying experience or an MMORPG. The online title is available in both English and German, and doesn't require any download, installation, or even registration to play.

Set in the Ultima universe (the new world of Caledonia, specifically), the game challenges players to "master the arts of diplomacy and trade, as well as the military activities of spying, plundering, and the takeover of enemy cities". Players build their village into a prosperous empire, either through diplomacy, commanding powerful armies, or trading resources.

Lord of Ultima also offers social features such as trading, alliance creation, online chat, and community forums. The game's virtual currency, diamonds, can be purchased with real money and used to buy items like city decorations from the in-game store.

"Lord of Ultima was designed to ensure that everyone, from strategy newcomers to diehard fans, can make it to the top of the leader board," says Phenomic's creative director Volker Wertich. "Phenomic is committed to building dynamic communities that delight players as they interact with the game, each other and the legendary world of Ultima."

Will Wright knows a thing or two about emerging genres. He's the creator of games such as The Sims and SimCity, which launched new categories in video games.

Social gaming is today's category that is experiencing surprisingly explosive growth. Wright acknowledges the quick rise of the sector, but is reluctant to say that the growth will continue indefinitely, noting past trends.

"I think [social gaming] is going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’s going to take over the world," he told IndustryGamers. "People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that."

He added, "There’s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there’s explosive growth in that niche; it’s like this void that’s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum."

"So right now we’re at the steep of that curve," he said. "If you extrapolate that out, it looks like 'Oh, that’s gonna be the whole market in five years,' but of course the curve never stays that steep."

The most-cited example of growth in the social games arena is Zynga's FarmVille. The Facebook farming game boasts over 32 million daily users and 80 million total users.

"It’s kind of like the ecosystems are in this gigantic disruptive phase," Wright said. "Whole new niches are opening and other ones are shrinking and so we’re seeing some very steep deltas in different directions right now. I get the sense that in a year from now we’ll start seeing these things plateau towards what their natural equilibrium is."

He said that The Sims did something similar, filling an entertainment vacuum that nobody even realized existed. The franchise has sold over 125 million units across 10 years.

"What’s still remarkable to me is that there hasn’t really been a viable competitor for [The Sims]," Wright added. "Usually when a genre opens up you get several competitors coming in to fill that genre, but in some sense The Sims is a game of its own genre, which for various reasons nobody’s really copied."

Looking for a cost-effective way to acquire new players for your online game? WorldsInMotion.biz has a new sister ad network, Game Advertising Online, which offers:

- A Top 100 Quantcast network, with 50 million unique viewers and two billion ad impressions served monthly.
- User friendly self-serve interface - just sign up, pay money in, and go!
- Simply pay per clickthrough (CPC) for your ads, with CPA tracking easily available.

The service is already a major choice for a number of leading free-to-play online game creators, thanks to its formidable reach and leading tools to track cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on investment across each of the network's video game-related and entertainment websites.

The network is notable for its user friendly self-service interface for advertisers to carefully manage their spend. Funds can be quickly deposited via PayPal or bank wire and advertisers are able to easily fine-tune their campaigns to pay only for placements that perform to their requirements.

In addition, a unique optional profit-tracking system and 'concierge' service for inventory management for top clients allow even more flexibility for those looking to showcase their free-to-play MMO or online game. More information and contact/application details are available via GAO's advertiser information section.

Game Advertising Online's ad network itself comprises a number of leading worldwide game-related and entertainment websites, each receiving a robust click-based return for banners served via the company's proprietary ad server and bidding-based advertising system.

GAO enables publishers to monetize their premium and/or remnant inventory with quality banner ads that are highly targeted to their audience. (We're currently also looking for new websites to join the GAO Network.)

Media giant Warner Bros. has acquired independent MMO developer Turbine, creator of Lord of the Rings Online, completing Warner's internal ownership of all Lord of the Rings-based video games.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a Boston Globe report pegs the purchase price as high as $160 million, based on information from "a source close to negotiation."

Warner has previously invested in Turbine, which since 1998 was heavily funded by a variety of venture capital sources. Last August, the company raised $6.6 million, and the previous year it completed a $40 million round from firms including Highland Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, Tudor Ventures, and Columbia Capital.

Turbine also develops Dungeons & Dragons Online, which has recently seen a resurgence of activity after adopting a free-to-play model, as well as its longest-running MMO, Asheron's Call.

Last year, Warner acquired from Electronic Arts the video game rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's original literary Lord of the Rings works and the Peter Jackson film trilogy. The films themselves are also distributed by Warner Bros.

The one exception to those rights was development of MMOs based on the literary works, which are now in-house as well.

"We have been looking to expand access to our online worlds to more players and more markets," said Turbine president and CEO Jim Crowley in a statement. "This acquisition is very exciting because it allows us to expand globally while continuing to focus on creating spectacular online games that our loyal fans and players have come to expect."

Founded in 1994, Massachusetts-based Turbine had stayed independent for effectively the entire history of graphical MMOs. Its first game Asheron's Call was released in 1999 and published by Microsoft; Turbine later reacquired all rights to the game.

Beyond The Lord of the Rings, Warner has been seeking to broaden its reach in video games for the last several years, having acquired several studios -- including a majority stake in Batman: Arkham Asylum creator Rocksteady Studios -- as well as much of the intellectual property of bankrupt publisher Midway.

Major media conglomerate and MySpace owner News. Corp has acquired Irata Labs, a small, San Francisco-based developer that's released social games on Facebook, iPhone, and Twitter. Neither companies revealed the terms of the deal, which closed late last week.

Founded in 2005, Irata Labs has three employees and is headed by CEO Chris Abad. The studio is best known for Spymaster, an espionage game originally built for Twitter and eventually extended to Facebook. In Spymaster, players take on missions and order assassinations, earning currency to buy better equipment and growing their spy ring (Twitter followers/Facebook friends).

The developer also produced iList Micro, an application that uses hashtags to turn Twitter into a classified advertising service, allowing users to post and search items for sale. As for its future releases, Irata Labs is working on Flyvy, a platform designed to "enable the rapid development of location-based social games", promising mechanics like resource collection, scavenger hunts, and more.

News Corp. doesn't plan to incorporate Irata into its major online assets, MySpace, or consumer site IGN, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. It is believed that the developers will work with those divisions, though, when it makes sense with different projects.

"The fact they built a social classified offering, iList, then they built a Twitter game -- these guys have shown they can be mold-breakers with great product. And that's what we care about," a person close to the acquisition told the L.A. Times.

Social gamers need to be hooked in the first five minutes -- and also need to be taught to play the game as well, says Digital Chocolate lead social designer Aki Jarvinen, in the latest feature at Gamasutra sister site Worlds in Motion.

"Because players of social games do not fork out money to have the chance to try out a game, their time is of precious quantity. Therefore developers need to catch and hold their attention both through viral spread and gameplay itself," writes Jarvinen.

Jarvinen examines both web and game development techniques, commonly blended in the social games space, in a quest to develop a method that retains gamers after their initial attempt at the game. One important web concept is "onboarding", which has "three key steps... accommodate, assimilate, and accelerate," writes Jarvinen.

"In terms of games, accommodation is about giving the necessary tools to the player, i.e. the necessary game mechanics and resources to start with. Assimilation gains a specific meaning from the context of the social network: It accounts for assimilation into the progress of one's friends playing the game, and the benefits from playing parallel to your friends. Acceleration then is about getting the player to engage with the game's full feature set and its possibilities."

Jarvinen also refers to Sid Meier's GDC 2010 keynote speech, in which he emphasized how the first 15 minutes of gameplay must be enjoyable. Writes Jarvinen, "In game design terms, this is about clear communication of an overall goal and the sub-goals, and giving the player always something to do."

He continues: "In social games, this takes a turn towards marketing-like techniques of influence, such as creating scarcity and the so-called curiosity gap through, e.g. locked features and levels. The gap functions as an addictive pull that makes players continue and come back."

The full feature, which includes a detailed breakdown of the first several minutes of several popular Facebook games, is live now on Gamasutra - First Five Minutes: How Tutorials Make or Break Your Social Game.

The return to growth in March's NPD results -- with further year-over-year strengthening of the retail games business forecast for much of the year to come -- may show steps toward strengthening investor confidence in what just a few months ago was all but pegged as a dead business.

Doom and gloom articles in the mainstream media and in financial publications pointed to explosive social media, console game development budgets at critical mass, and a Wii bubble-bust as reasons for a market contraction the reversal of which none could easily predict.

But even at our own game development events, like GDC, the prevalence of confident social venture capitalists and developers making an exodus to the Facebook and iPhone space made even the most optimistic traditional game creator -- or player -- feel a little cynical.

Certainly the gaming-lite trend is poised to continue, and it remains a fruitful space for the investment of resources and attention on all sides. But the Facebook gold rush is also highly reminiscent of another buzzworthy trend that's not too far behind us: the virtual worlds craze.

Just two to three years ago, avatar-based social interaction was considered the wave of the future. As internet savvy rapidly went mainstream starting at the turn of the millennium, ceasing to be the province of only the early adopters, the way users established identities online and interacted with one another began to draw a good deal of consideration.

Mark Pincus, CEO of FarmVille developer Zynga, said at this week's Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco that "Facebook is at a crossroads," according to a Venture Beat report.

Answering a question about what he wants from the social network, he said, "[Facebook] has to decide whether it's more important to be the web’s social platform, or to make their social plumbing pervasive."

While Facebook has over 400 million users, Pincus said the network has an opportunity to become much more universal, as he suggested apps could usurp traditional websites if Facebook would focus more on the "plumbing" that would serve as the foundation for app makers like Zynga.

"Where this ought to go is it should be an open Xbox Live for the web," he said. "If we get to this place where there are achievements, a consistent user experience, a way for web publishers and networks and sites to participate, and an easy way for developers to develop amazing game experiences that enhance relationships among people, then I think social gaming can end up being the few real consumer experiences on the web and be a massively large business for all of us."

But he said that Facebook might choose to continue down the narrower path of being a leading social network instead. "They have a more obvious business model around being a portal [supported by ads]," Pincus said. "I hope they find the business model around the plumbing."

In the games industry, the free-to-play platform is a business model that involves freely-downloadable games that generate revenues through microtransactions and advertising.

But for Joshua Hong, CEO of free MMO publisher GamersFirst, "Free2Play" is also a political platform. Hong is in fact running as a write-in candidate for governor of California, and yes, he is running on the "Free2Play Platform."

The campaign has the markings of a marketing stunt. Earlier this month it wasn't completely clear whether Hong was for real, because the campaign's initial unveiling landed in close proximity to April Fool's day.

But Ronjini Mukhopadhyay, senior PR manager for Hong's campaign, who also happens to be senior PR manager for GamersFirst, insisted to Gamasutra in a phone interview that the campaign is no joke. "He is running as a write-in candidate. He's not actually on the ballot for the primaries, so people would actually have to write him in to get on the ballot," she said.

Hong's "Free2Play Platform" -- the political one -- is based on "people, performance and plurality."

He explained in a press statement, "The three Tent Poles (people, performance and plurality) encompass a majority of the issues that not only our state faces, but even for the national government."

Hong's platform focuses on "putting Californians first," educational objectives, accountability for political officials and equality, among other bullet points.

Asked if Hong is using a political campaign to simply promote his gaming company, Mukhopadhyay replied, "[The free-to-play business model] is where a lot of the inspiration comes from. It's what he knows best, and he translates that to what would work best for the government."

She added, "Yeah, there will probably be people that think 'Oh, you can't do that, it's a gaming company versus a government and that just sounds ridiculous.' But it's more about using the experience that he's acquired and using the inspiration from the GamersFirst company."

Browser-based MMO developer Artix Entertainment announced a partnership with Playspan enabling players of its game to purchase premium content with the online game monetization platform's UltimatePay Service.

UltimatePay provides more than 85 global payment methods for virtual currency and goods, including credit cards, PayPal, mobile, cash based, and PlaySpan's Ultimate Game Card prepaid card. The service is designed to be transparent, but it will power Artix's transactions.

Artix's free-to-play, browser-based titles, which have attracted more than 100 million registered users, include AdventureQuest Worlds, EpicDuel, DragonFable, MechQuest, and AdventureQuest. In the first two, players can pay to access exclusive classes, weapons, areas, shops, quests, and pets.

"We selected PlaySpan as our main payment services provider based on its solid reputation and demonstrated expertise," said Daniel Vasile, Business Development Manager of Artix Entertainment. "UltimatePay provides a secure and easy purchase experience for our millions of players, enabling them to enjoy the fantastic members only content available in each of our games."

Chinese software and online game developer Kingsoft Corporation Limited plans to expand to North America and Europe, and will launch two online games in those regions next year as beachheads.

Headquartered in Zhuhai (with four other development centers in China), the company already has a presence in Southeast Asia countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore, according to Kingsoft CFO Wang Donghui in a report posted by local IT portal Enet and translated by TradingMarkets.

The developer was founded in 1989 established its first overseas subsidiary two years ago in Malaysia. It is considering a Taiwan branch, and has placed a priority on Russia, the UK, Germany, France, and the US for its North America/Europe expansion plans.

Kingsoft hopes to increase its overseas sales to 20 percent of its total revenues in the next two years, and wants to become one of the top five Chinese online game developers in the next three years.

The studio's online games include CQ Online, JX Online, The First Myth, and several others. Late last year, Kingsoft announced a joint venture with MMO company Shanda Games Limited for the marketing and distribution of free-to-play martial arts MMORPGs JX Online and JX Online 3.

GDC Online organizers have announced that the call for submissions is open for the leading online game-focused conference, which takes place this October 5-8 in Austin, Texas.

GDC Online, formerly known as GDC Austin, is now accepting submissions through midnight EDT on Wednesday, May 19th to present lectures, roundtables, tutorials and panel sessions at the largest worldwide industry event to concentrate specifically on social games, free-to-play titles, MMOs, and more.

To address the unprecedented growth in the online and social game space over the last year, development and business-oriented submissions for GDC Online are being sought after, in content tracks including Business and Marketing, Design, Production, and Programming.

Notably new to this year’s event is the “Live” track, which will discuss successful post-launch strategies to help increase profitability and retention. This topic covers metric-driven live development, design patterns for viral mechanics, and the balance between customer service and community relations.

GDC Online is keenly focused on development of connected games including social network titles, free-to-play web games, kid-friendly online titles, large-scale MMOs, and more, with a leading advisory board guiding the evaluation and choice of lectures.

In addition to the main conference content, GDC Online will present specialized Summit programs, with in-depth business and technical advice on major up-and-coming facets of the game industry, including 3D stereoscopic games and iPad development.

Submissions are now also being accepted for these Summits, including the iPhone Games Summit, the Game Narrative Summit, the 3D Stereoscopic Games Summit and the iPad Gaming Summit, following the recent announcement of these events on the first two days of the conference.

"While the name of the conference has changed, GDC Online will continue its heritage of presenting the most knowledgeable speakers on the vital online game space, alongside other emerging markets", said Izora de Lillard, event director of GDC Online. "This October, Austin, Texas will be the epicenter for established developers and industry trailblazers to come together, learn, and continue to grow the connected gaming space."

GDC Online will take place October 5-8, 2010 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. To learn more about the submissions guidelines and conference topics for GDC Online, for which registration will open in the near future, visit the official GDC Online website.

Social game developer Zynga says its users raised more than $130,00 through virtual goods purchases to benefit Water.org, a non-profit devoted to providing safe drinking water to people in developing countries, and the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA).

The company held two five-day campaigns in its games, inviting players to buy limited edition digital goods for the causes. Around 24,000 gamers bought a virtual teddy bear for the HDSA campaign, which will go toward research efforts for finding a Huntington's Disease cure.

The Water.org campaign sold 70,000 virtual fish to FishVille players, benefiting over 500 Haitians living in makeshift dwellings as the disease-filled rainy season approaches. Zynga added that over 60,000 FishVille players visited the Water.org to learn more about the non-profit, directing 10 times more traffic than usual to the site.

The two campaigns follows three months after the FarmVille developer and its users raised $1.5 million through virtual good sales for Haiti aid. So far, Zynga has raised more than $3 million for charity causes through its social games.

"Even before the earthquake, the water crisis in Haiti was severe," said Water.org co-founder Gary White, according to a report from Mashable. "Like so many other places on our planet, people living in poverty struggle to obtain the basic needs of water and proper sanitation."

He added, "The partnership with Zynga will allow us to more quickly scale our efforts to reach the people of Haiti with life-saving safe drinking water projects.

Interplay will continue to sell older Fallout games and continue work on a Fallout MMO, the game publisher said Thursday in a regulatory filing.

The news comes as Fallout IP owner Bethesda Softworks on Wednesday dismissed an appeal that sought to overturn a U.S. District Court judge's ruling denying a motion by Bethesda to enjoin Interplay from selling the catalog Fallout titles and working on the MMO, also known as Project V13.

Interplay distributes the franchise games Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, which it owns and has been making available via physical and digital outlets.

A Wednesday court filing said the court would dismiss the appeal "upon such terms as have been agreed to by the parties," suggesting the possibility of a confidential settlement between Bethesda and Interplay on some aspects of the case.

However, in an aggressively worded SEC filing, Interplay said that it will continue to pursue counterclaims against Bethesda, which include breach of contract, declaratory judgment and an award for damages, attorneys fees and "other relief."

In a March 1 court filing, Interplay's lawyers claimed that Bethesda purposefully tried dragging out the case in order to exploit Interplay's "negative financial situation." The filing argued why Bethesda should pay Interplay's legal fees: "Bethesda was keenly aware that Interplay could not fund expensive, protracted litigation."

Bethesda filed suit against Interplay in September 2009, accusing Interplay of trademark infringement involving the sale of Fallout games prior to Fallout 3. In the original suit, Bethesda also claimed that the Interplay-developed Fallout MMO did not garner enough funding ($30 million) and failed to ramp up to "full scale" development by an agreed-upon time.

Bethesda had previously argued that due to the alleged breach of contract, Interplay should lose its rights to the MMO, and that the rights should revert back to Bethesda.

In 2007, Bethesda purchased the Fallout franchise from Interplay in full for $5.75 million. Within that purchase agreement was a trademark licensing agreement that allowed Interplay to license back the rights to develop an MMO based on the Fallout series.

[UPDATE: Bethesda's Pete Hines commented to Kotaku that the lawsuit "is still ongoing and has not been resolved. It is a minor procedural thing that took place, not a dropping of the lawsuit."

Hines added: "The bottom line is it's an ongoing legal matter, it's in no way, shape or form done... We're going to let the process play out in the courts, which is what we've said all along, but beyond that I can't give specifics as to procedures. That's not my domain."]

At Facebook's f8 developer conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and and program manager Deb Liu shared details on wide rollout of the program, currently in beta, to offer a centralized payment scheme for Facebook games and apps.

The Story on Credits

According to a VentureBeat report, the Facebook Credits program is currently in beta with over 100 apps, and the company plans to launch the program in June.

Thanks to many different games currently offering their own payment methods, users don't tend to pay in more than one of them, according to Liu. She said, "We built this with the user in mind. The mental hurdle of moving to pay for something is high... Imagine Facebook Credits as more like a euro, which makes it easy to spend money across countries."

The company also intends to reward players in Facebook credits -- in ways such as loyalty programs with credit card companies like Chase, a potential example cited by Liu in her presentation. Facebook also plans to distribute free credits to its users to entice them to start spending in games that use them.

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 THQ, Bungie, 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:

Insomniac Games: Cinematic Audio Specialist
"Insomniac Games is an independent videogame developer with award-winning hits for the PS, PS2 and PS3. We created the first three Spyro the Dragon games, and the Ratchet and Clank franchise. We are also the team behind Resistance: Fall of Man, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Resistance 2, and most recently - Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time! If that's not enough, we've also have been named one of the Best Small Companies to work for! Come check us out!"

Honolulu-based developer Avatar Reality says Blue Mars, its 3D virtual world platform has attracted less than 100,000 registered users since its open beta launched in September 2009, but that audience is growing 10 percent every month.

Blue Mars is designed to allow artists and developers to create and distribute 3D games and applications globally in a scalable and secure environment. Avatar Reality began selling virtual land in the platform to third-party developers last January.

The developer's CEO Jim Sink revealed these figures to local alternative newspaper Honolulu Weekly and discussed the company's plans to transform Blue Mars from a downloadable client to a browser-based experience.

"The current version of the game is slow on older PCs," he admitted. "We’re adopting a new technology called the Cloud Fusion Server this summer though that will allow anyone to play Blue Mars online."

Sink beieves this switch will open Blue Mars up to a new audience. He adds, "[It will] allow us to put Blue Mars on Facebook so you can play with your friends in our 3D virtual reality world. Most of the growth in the gaming industry is in social gaming right now."

Avatar Reality just announced three weeks ago that it picked up $4.2 million in additional capital from co-founder/game industry legend Henk Rogers and Kolohala Ventures, bringing its total amount of funding to $13 million.

Animal rights group PETA is calling on social game developer Zynga to reverse its decision to make virtual animals a "combat item" for fighting in Mafia Wars starting next week.

Zynga announced earlier this week that players will soon be able to take virtual animals -- along with their weapons, armor, and vehicles -- into in-game fights and robberies. This change affects all animals, including tigers, lions, and pit bulls. PETA is particularly bothered by the company's portrayal of pit bulls (pictured).

"Sure, it's just a game, but perpetuating the image of pit bulls as fighting machines is reckless and wrong," commented Zynga's Jennifer O'Connor in an open letter to Zynga. "It is particularly troubling in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a law banning the distribution of videos glorifying such cruelty to animals."

"Pit bulls already face a public relations battle and are the most abused breed of dog. PETA's fieldworkers see pit bulls in horrific conditions every day. They are frequently kept chained or penned, they are taunted and trained to be aggressive, and they are beaten and starved—sometimes to death."

Zynga is already promoting the upcoming feature by allowing players to earn animals in Mafia Wars during jobs, fights, and robberies. Players can also purchase "Vicious Crates" containing limited edition animals (African Lions, Pit Bulls) from the Mafia Wars marketplace.

"This is a rare, er, misfire for Zynga, the maker of lots of popular online games," adds O'Connor. "Zynga recently started offering special bulldogs in YoVille, the proceeds of which are donated to the San Francisco SPCA. So let's hope that it will listen to our appeal."

She asks that concerned animal rights advocates send a polite e-mail message to Zynga's customer service department to ask that they leave animals out of Mafia Wars.

Vikas Gupta, CEO of virtual payments firm Social Gold, says that the Facebook Credits system of introducing a universal and possibly mandatory virtual currency for the social network could hurt purchases in apps and games.

Speaking at the f8 developer conference earlier this week, Facebook's program manager Deb Liu described a two-step process for Credits, in users purchase the digital cash through a variety of methods (e.g. credit card, mobile payments), then convert the Credits to another currency when spending it in a game.

Liu admitted that this two-step process could potentially extend and slow down microtransaction purchases, and even possibly discourage gamers who would otherwise buy virtual goods/cash in their favorite free-to-play games through a more streamlined checkout system.

"We’ve always argued that the purchase experience needs to be in-game, user friendly and above all frictionless," commented Gupta, according to a report from VentureBeat. "This means that the money should flow from one end of the system (user’s pocket) to the other side (the game) with least amount of friction or steps involved."

He continued, "We consistently see that this is what the ideal model is, and this is what drives better conversion and higher ARPU for games. This is also what users want — there is less confusion, and the users do not get disengaged from the game they are playing."

"Whenever the users have to buy one currency and then convert it to the game’s currency, the conversion is poor. However the games will always want to have their own currency. Given this, it seems Facebook has a challenge on its hands: Facebook Credits have poorer conversion and therefore lower monetization than platforms like Social Gold."

Gupta's comments came a couple days after Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerburg told Bloomberg TV the social network is considering making Credits mandatory for all apps: "There's just going to be one currency that people use. ... There is definite value for users and developers in having the trusted Facebook brand associated with buying virtual goods."

Having Credits as a virtual currency benefits Facebook in another way, as the company plans to take a 30 percent share from all revenue generated with the digital cash, similar to Apple's arrangement with App Store purchases. Social Gold only charges 7 to 10 percent with the virtual payments it handles.

"We continue to believe that Facebook identity — thanks to the simple and elegant Open Graph API — will be everywhere on the web," said Gupta. "On that Open Graph, developers have two choices to monetize: a low conversion, high fee universal currency (Facebook Credits), or a high conversion, low fee platform like (Social Gold)."