Online monetization platform Live Gamer has partnered with THQ to bring a microtransaction model to Company of Heroes Online for the game's North American launch, the companies said Monday.

It's THQ's latest move in the publisher's efforts to realign its business to focus more on online models. Live Gamer said that the real-time strategy game Company of Heroes Online is just the first of THQ's offerings that will implement the platform, with more Facebook, PC and mobile-based microtransaction games on the way.

"It helps accelerate their plans. It helps them focus on what they do best, making great games, building communities and marketing," Live Gamer president and co-founder Andrew Schneider told Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra in an interview. His past experience includes other digital distribution-related positions at companies like NBC Interactive, Sony Pictures and Sony Music.

In a statement, THQ EVP of casual games and global online services Martin Good called microtransactions a "viable and profitable revenue stream," and said the Live Gamer partnership is "a critical component" of his company's online strategy.

Casual gaming publisher PlayFirst made its first major step into the social gaming space with a Facebook adaptation of its popular multiplatform Chocolatier franchise.

Originally debuted in September 2007, the series has sold millions of copies on PC, Nintendo DS, iPhone, and other platforms. The Chocolatier games have players seeking the best ingredients to create chocolates that they can then sell to sweets shops.

Chocolatier: Sweet Society for Facebook features the same concepts and is set in 1882 like the original game, but it also emphasizes three new points: dual destination gameplay allowing users to manage both a shop and a factory, "lickable art" for the chocolates, and social elements (e.g. selling chocolates to friends).

With the game's release, PlayFirst points out a Frank N. Magid Associates survey it sponsored titled “Magid Media Futures 2010 Social Media and Consumers”, which found that 38 percent of regular social network users aged 18 and up play social games, and 58 percent of those players are women -- a group the publisher says fits Chocolatier's audience.

"Our goal with Chocolatier: Sweet Society was to take a franchise millions of players love and bring it to Facebook in a way that is authentic and compelling to both the brand and the social platform," says PlayFirst CEO Mari Baker. "In limited release, we’ve already reached over a quarter million players and we’re confident this game will please the sweet tooth of Facebook gamers everywhere."

Sony's PlayStation Home has always been positioned as a social platform, and now it seems SCEA is eager to drive that with some social games, announcing today that independent label Codename is developing and curating a series of new games exclusively for the console's virtual environment.

SCEA and Codename will work together to convene indie developers from around the world who can create games for the "Home platform" on PlayStation 3 -- and four are already prepped for rollout "over the next several months," developed by "a mix of fan-favorite, die-hard experimental and undiscovered first-time developers."

The aim of the program is, according to SCEA, to "further solidify PlayStation Home’s place as a leading social game platform." The focus is on that social element, apparently, as Sony's highlighting the ability to "share, interact and communicate with new and existing friends.

Dueling Gentlemen is a strategy title played on Home's Plaza -- it's developed by The Odd Gentlemen, acclaimed creators of The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Indiecade 2010 Audience Award winner Peanut Gallery has developed Minor Battle, a team-based capture-the-flag style platformer that pits two teams against each other.

Codename itself has developed Super Awesome Mountain RPG, which is described as blending board game and fantasy RPG elements. Finally, Home will host a 3D multiplayer version of Lazy8's gear-based puzzler Cogs as a "dynamic public spectacle in the plaza.

"We’re thrilled to be partnering with PlayStation Home to create and develop games that step outside the parameters of traditional game development and we’re really looking forward to the creative opportunities that lie ahead," said Jesse Vigil, a founding partner of Codename. "Our model of pulling together teams of developers and allowing them to make their creative dreams a reality has only one main tenet -- any game created for PlayStation Home is graphically and visually entertaining to both play and watch, at the same time," he says.

SCEA says Home -- now home to 14 million users -- is "at a critical point at its lifecycle." The primary goal of the Codename partnership, according to the company, is to boost social gaming on the service, and it also hopes the new offerings will attract new audiences.

British consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser has launched poweRBrands, a new Facebook game allowing players to join a virtual corporation and move up the corporate ladder.

Reckitt Benckiser specializes in household, health, and personal care products, and is the parent of major brands such as Lysol, Clearasil, Woolite, and many others. The firm is headquartered in London and operates in 60 countries, with a U.S. headquarters in Parsippany, NJ.

The company created poweRBrands with the help of Euro RSCG Riley and Nudge Social Media. In the game, players start off as a marketing executive, completing tasks and working with teams to eventually become the global president of a corporation very much like the consumer goods corporation.

Reckitt Benckiser calls the title "the first Facebook game of its kind", as it's designed to test players' marketing and business abilities, teach strategy and decision-making skills, and introduce users to the culture and challenges that face the company's marketers every day.

poweRBrands is part of a series of initiatives that are meant to reach out to talented students and people early on in their career. Reckitt Benckiser says the program will show gamers in the 18-30 age group how it operates while emphasizing the differences in its culture compared to other companies in the same space.

The British firm plans to run a U.S. marketing campaign for poweRBrands from late-August to September, which will comprise of advertisements for the game on relevant sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo! HotJobs.

"It is not a direct recruitment tool, but is a great way to introduce students and early careers sales people and marketers to our culture – and we hope that some of them may look further at our website and other career information," explains Reckitt Benckiser's global communications director Andraea Dawson-Shepherd

She adds, "Facebook is a natural home for poweRBrands – it is the fastest growing social network site and, like RB, a truly global phenomenon. We hope that the lure of fun challenges, tasks and the competitive element of playing with your friends and colleagues will prove a real draw."

Social media marketing firm Apps Savvy published a case study finding that virtual goods campaigns significantly helped increase brand awareness, ad awareness, and purchase intent with users.

The new study compared branded virtual goods campaigns against mobile advertising norms, finding that the latter increased brand awareness by 44.5 percent to 69.8 percent, boosted ad awareness by 60.1 percent to 74.2 percent, and growing purchase intent by 31.5 percent to 62.8 percent.

Apps Savvy conducted its study with digital marketing research firm InsightExpress, which surveyed 2,894 participants while examining the effectiveness of an iPhone app campaign for Powermat wireless charging accessories in Booyah's location-based app MyTown.

The Powermat campaign included a sweepstakes promotion allowing users to enter to win prizes by physically interacting with Powermat products at stores, as well as branded virtual goods rewards given to MyTown users when they checked in at a Powermat retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Bed Bath and Beyond.

Apps Savvy points out that the virtual goods marketing outperformed InsightExpress' mobile and online norms, as the campaign saw a nearly 3x lift in purchase intent over mobile internet norms, a 5x lift in aided awareness over mobile video norms, and a 10x lift in ad awareness over online tech norms.

"There is a tremendous amount of buzz in the advertising community around virtual goods. Today's research should significantly raise that as the results of delivering branded items proved to drive metrics through the roof," claimed Apps Savvy co-founder and CEO Chris Cunningham.

Offer-based ad network Offerpal Media announced the launch of SocialKast, a new user acquisition and re-engagement tool designed to help game developers connect with audiences across multiple social channels and platforms.

The company says this new solution gives developers access to over one billion users in 150 countries through integrations with its open application platform providers like Yahoo and others. Studios can take advantage of REST messaging APIs and Javascript calls in SocialKast to write their code just once to interact with multiple platforms.

Once they've integrated SocialKast support in their titles, developers can distribute user-to-user and application-to-user invites, gifts, notifications, and other text-based/graphical messages to activity streams, email inboxes, and other areas of Offerpal's partner sites.

Offerpal believes that its platform will help developers further extend their reach while driving viral awareness and distribution for their titles. It is offering access to SocialKast as a value-added service to select developers and platforms already using its full-service monetization platform.

The platform's launch comes just a week after the firm revealed that it will lay off an unspecified amount of its staff after losing a lucrative deal for Facebook's Credits system to a rival ad network. It expressed a need to refocus its resources on areas such as "other gaming platforms, open web gaming, new Internet verticals," and mobile.

Offerpal says SocialKast represents one of many new rollouts it has planned for the rest of the year to support its expansion into new ares as it shifts its gaze from Facebook to Yahoo! and mobile platforms. The company claims it is in "a position for a strong fourth quarter and continued high-growth throughout 2011."

"In the current environment, it has proven both costly and difficult for game developers to find new sources of distribution," says Offerpal Media CEO and chairman George Garrick. "SocialKast solves this problem by boosting a game's K-factor to accelerate viral growth and lower the developer's cost of acquisition."

He adds, "It also enables gamers to exchange detailed and timely notifications with each other regardless of which platform they're on, while benefiting publishers, platforms, networks and advertisers by attracting new users, generating more page views and broadening the social graph."

Microtransactions will help social games generate more than $1 billion in 2012 despite growth in the sector slowing after this year, according to research from global media markets analyst firm Screen Digest.

The social gaming market has seen explosive growth in the past three years, making $76 million in 2008, $639 million in 2009, and a predicted $826 million this year. With that revenue growth, the number of new titles and gamers playing these releases have also increased dramatically.

Despite the substantial rise of revenues in this space, Screen Digest believes that growth will slow significantly after 2010. It says that converting free gamers to customers, growing spend from existing customers, and increasing its reach beyond Facebook will be key to the industry for continued growth.

The research group also examined three common business models for social games and apps -- lead generation/offers, advertising, and virtual currency purchases through microtransactions -- and found that the last group represents "the largest revenue opportunity" for developers through to 2014.

"Improving game design and cultivating a better understanding of conversion trigger points will enable social game operators to gradually increase the rate at which they convert free gamers to paying customers and also how much these customers spend," says Screen Digest's Games head Piers Harding-Rolls.

"This trend has already occurred in other microtransactional games markets – massively multiplayer online games is the key example -- and Screen Digest expects the social games sector to follow this pattern providing ongoing market growth even across well penetrated markets and networks.”

The firm's study also identified the global top five social game operators in 2009: Zynga, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts), Playdom, Five Minutes, and SlashKey. It notes that these outfits held a combined market share of 56 percent in 2009, up from 38 percent in 2008.

Zynga, developer of Facebook hits like FarmVille and Texas HoldEm, naturally was the biggest social games operator with a total of 242 million monthly active users across its titles at the end of 2009. Its closest userbase competitor was Chinese studio Five Minutes with 73 million users, while its closest revenue competitor was Playfish.

Gaming social network Raptr, which is growing rapidly with 500,000 new users registering each month, has come out of beta with the 1.0 release of its free buddy list/messaging application.

Launched with a closed beta in February 2008 with an open beta following in September, Raptr is a service allowing users to set up a single profile displaying what games they play, see what their friends are playing, chat with each other, and track achievements across multiple platforms -- Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC (Steam, Xfire), and social network games.

Along with tracking titles on multiple services, which Raptr says makes it easier for users to join their friends in a game, the program offers in-game messaging across various networks. With this setup, players can chat live with each other whether they're on Facebook, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or other services while playing titles like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty.

The company says more than a million users participated in the Raptr application's beta, and the service is bringing in around 15,000 to 20,000 new users each day. Raptr currently tracks over 250,000,000 minutes of gameplay each month.

"Over the last two years we have gotten great feedback from our users that has helped us create a service that meets the needs of a more connected gamer who plays games on multiple gaming platforms," says Raptr CEO and founder Dennis Fong. "With the release of Version 1.0 we hope that gamers will be able to connect with their friends easier and make gaming even more fun for everyone."

Casual gaming company Oberon Media has launched Blaze, a global distribution platform for social games, downloadable casual titles, and mobile releases that reaches some 50 million social/casual players monthly.

The platform delivers titles across a network of more than 150 partner sites around the world, and is designed to help social game developers reach a new audience of casual game players, while also allowing casual game players to find their favorite social titles displayed side-by-side with the casual releases they're used to.

Oberon's Blaze SDK enables developers to publish their games once and send them out to its network within days. The company's initial social game developer partners so far include Playdom, Evermore Media, Playrix, MetroGames, Backstage, Gogii, Slingo, i-Jet Media, and Nimbus Games.

The platform allows studios to integrate several social features such as sharing or recommending games, sending free trial time as a gift, becoming fans of a game, earning achievements, challenging friends, and seeing what friends are playing.

"With the launch of Blaze, Oberon’s game-changing platform can provide huge benefits to game developers, our partners, and consumers," says Oberon's chief strategy officer Ofer Leidner.

He continues, "Developers enjoy easy integration to a network of tens of millions of new players. Our partners gain access to an exciting array of games that use social integration to generate traffic and increase revenue. And consumers are able to access all their favorite social and casual games in one place. It’s a win, win, win solution for everyone."

Online game publisher GCrest America has chosen Super Rewards, the virtual currency-focused subsidiary of Adknowledge, for its monetization solutions in popular free-to-play virtual world TinierMe.

In TinierMe -- known as @games in Japan, where it has more than a million active players -- users create customizable avatars in a world centered around Japanese manga comics, play games, chat with friends, and participate in events that follow the Japanese festival calendar (e.g. Cherry Blossom Festival).

Thanks to its partnership with Super Rewards, GCrest America can reward players with free in-game points, virtual goods, and virtual currency when they participate in offers like completing a survey, watching a video, or subscribing to online services.

Super Rewards says its offers not only help generates revenue for publishers but also converts non-paying players into revenue-producing users. It also offers a targeting and filtering system designed to present "the right offers" to appeal to specific users' tastes.

Furthermore, the firm employes a fraud protection system that uses a combination of proprietary systems, internal reviews, and technology from ThreatMetrix, which helps it "identify suspicious activity and remove fraudulent activity before it reaches publishers."

"We are very excited to partner with GCrest, who provides a unique and highly engaging experience with the use of anime in TinierMe,” says Super Rewards' Social Currency division general manager Jason Bailey. "We understand the unique needs of virtual world publishers, particularly those in Asia looking to expand into the U.S.

Bailey continues, "Our diverse ad offer inventory, global reach, sophisticated fraud protection and management, customization options, and top-notch customer service are all very attractive for game publishers who need to maximize revenue and enhance the overall user experience.”

Casual gaming network WildTangent announced WildTangent Games, a new online service and application that features social games and premium flash titles alongside its catalog of casual releases.

The new app is designed to encourage users to find games they'll enjoy regardless if they're social titles or WildTangent's traditional casual games library, which offers more than 1,000 releases from developers like Disney, PopCap, and Ubisoft. It also features a tab system that access other media like music, movies, and social networking sites.

WildTangent's Games application is still in "preview mode", but the company is already calling it "the games service of choice for all major PC and device manufacturers" and is making it available in ten languages. It is currently looking for feedback on the service, promising to incorporate useful suggestions into the app's release version.

The firm says its bringing its digital currency (WildCoins) and advertising partners to the Games app so players can have the option of participating in offers to receive free virtual goods/currency, purchasing digital items with WildCoins, or other choices.

"Our new games service will be an entirely new arena for both game players and the game developers who create great experiences for our consumers," says WildTangent's senior vice president Sean Vanderdasson.

He adds, "We'll continue to offer games tailored for all members of the household as well as our unique free/rent/own model. Now, however, developers of all types, including social developers and those whose games include digital items, can benefit from inclusion within our service."

Developer Zattikka announced its raising of $5.5 million through its parent company Expedite 5 -- funds that it will put toward broadening its catalog of browser and mobile titles, specifically social games.

Investment fund Notion Capital Partners led the round of financing, with a group of private individuals also participating, including Harald Ludwig, co-chairman of Lions Gate Entertainment. Ludwig will also now lead Zattikka's board of directors.

Based in London and founded in August 2009 by former Virgin Games executives Tim Chaney and Mark Opzoomer, the studio has already produced more than 100 titles. Zattikka currently develops at least two new games each week, and its portfolio of releases has seen 77 million recorded gameplays and reached one million monthly unique users last month.

The start-up acquired web games portal Gimme5Games last September, which features titles like Finger Frenzy World, Balloon Headed Boy, and the Phantom Mansion series. Last month, it launched BadHead, a new portal catering to the hardcore gaming market.

Zattikka says that with its new funding, it will invest in "recruitment, research and development, and marketing" to expand its catalog to take advantage of "diversifying audiences for social gaming." It points out that most of its audience growth in recent months has come from territories where consumer demand for social games is "increasing exponentially".

"Over the past two years the consumer appetite for online gaming has increased significantly with revenue already standing at over $2.25bn in 2008 and growing 20 per cent per annum," says CEO Chaney. "This much broader audience is being driven by females and premium gamers developing a passion for casual social gaming."

The executive adds, "To successfully operate in such a competitive fast-growth industry we are focused on developing games that appeal to the different demographics of this wider audience. This round of funding led by Notion Capital means we can now push ahead with recruiting even more skilled people and put substantial investment behind product development and marketing.”

On a per-capita basis among virtual goods buyers, women are spending nearly twice as much as men, according to a new study conducted by PlaySpan and VGMarket, even though more men are buying virtual goods overall.

The average female buyer spends fully twice the amount on in-game money as the average male buyer: $50 per year versus $25 per year. For virtual items, the gap was smaller, but still significant: $55 per year versus $30 per year, or 83 percent more for the average female.

Median values for the sexes were much closer. Median total spending among female players was $80 per year for females and $60 for men, meaning the above averages may be affected fairly heavily by the extremes on either end of the spending spectrum, which have a much smaller effect on median figures.

Despite the individual gender disparities, men may still be more likely overall to spend money on virtual goods. Of the 2221 surveyed individuals between the ages of 13 and 64, 78 percent were male, and 75 percent of the total sample said they had purchased virtual goods in the past year.

For the purposes of the study, virtual goods encompassed items, game content, and currency in social games, massively multiplayer games, and online PC and console games, including add-on levels and other DLC.

It is possible that women had a relatively low total representation in the survey as a whole because many respondents play online PC and console games that tend to be less played by female audiences; also, those games tend to feature infrequent opportunities to buy virtual goods, whereas social and MMO games -- which have higher female representation -- often offer ongoing paid content and options.

Popular social network Facebook now has more than 500 million active users after six years of operation, though many of the site's popular social games haven't seen much benefit from this influx in their userbase.

The social network hit this major milestone about five and a half months after announcing its reach of 400 million users. This explosive growth isn't a recent development either, as it managed to hit that 400 million achievement after growing from 300 million users in the space of just five months.

Facebook's popularity can be attributed to a number of features, such as connecting with friends, tracking events, sharing photos, discovering media, interacting with applications, and playing the thousands of social games available on the site -- several of which attract tens of millions of players each month.

"I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started six years ago," said Facebook's co-founder, CEO, and president Mark Zuckerberg in a post published on Facebook's blog.

Despite Facebook's dramatic userbase growth, many of the top social games hosted on the site haven't enjoyed the same gains in their audiences, and in fact have lost millions of users in recent months due to changes the social network enacted in its application notification system to limit "notification spam".

Zynga's FarmVille, the most popular app on Facebook, for example, went from its peak of 85 million monthly active users last March to now 61.6 million. Many of the studio's other titles have suffered similar losses, though it has gained some of those users back with FrontierVille, its newest release currently boasting 20.7 million users.

As Facebook looks to expand its audience to one billion users, though, it's devoting more resources to social games, seeking out ways to better attract players to its game offerings and even creating a new team to exclusively work with developers.

"... just like photos, just like events, games are a killer app on Facebook, and a primary part of the user experience on Facebook," said the company's chief technology officer Bret Taylor in a recent interview with Inside Facebook. "We have product managers and engineers who are extremely talented now working on it."

"Right now we have a Games dashboard that I would say is pretty uninspired. It works, but it’s not something that I think is revolutionary. We have a team now who is responsible for making games successful on Facebook as a category, and when we make changes to our overall product, we’re going to track the effects on that category just like we track the effects on photos and events on Facebook."

Social game and app developer RockYou has entered into a five-year agreement with Facebook to exclusively use Credits, the social network's universal virtual currency system, in its titles.

RockYou joins several other studios that have agreed to only use Facebook credits in their games, such as LOLapps (Band of Heroes) and CrowdStar (Happy Aquarium), with the latter also signing a similar five-year deal with the site.

Facebook's system allows players to acquire virtual currency that they can spend in any app or game that supports Credits, offering a more portable digital cash option than the numerous game- or publisher-specific virtual currencies that many titles employ.

This isn't the first time RockYou has worked with the social network on its Credits system -- earlier this year, the developer ran an advertiser-sponsored "Deal of the Day" program that rewarded more than 1 million users with Credits in just four days when those players interacted with in-game ads.

The Redwood City-based startup has issued more than 5 million Credits in its most popular game, Zoo World, alone through direct payments and ad offers that allow users to earn virtual currency. Facebook adds that it's worked closely with RockYou to develop and evolve its Credits system, too.

As with other developers, RockYou will receive 70 percent of the revenue generated from Credits, while Facebook pockets the remaining 30 percent. The social network says it will put that all of that cash toward lubricating its virtual economy through ad offers, prepaid cards, and other opportunities for seeding Credits to users.

"Facebook is showing a long-term commitment to social gaming -- and that's very exciting," says RockYou's chief revenue officer Lisa Marino. "We look forward to continue working with Facebook and Facebook Credits. As users adopt Credits, there may be a great opportunity for us to increase revenue from both a virtual goods and advertising perspective."

Online gaming microtransactions company Live Gamer announced that it will power the virtual economy for GameHouse Fusion, RealNetworks' social gaming platform offering thousands of titles.

Launched last May with a free app for Facebook, GameHouse Fusion is designed to provide socially connected games across multiple platforms. GameHouse, a division of RealNetworks, touted support from media and technology companies such as Comcast, MySpace, Mattel, and PopCap Games.

Players interacting with titles on the platform can not only access GameHouse's catalog of titles but also receive notifications and news feeds, check leaderboards, join in multiplayer games with friends, purchase and spend virtual currency, and chat live, all across supported social networks and online devices.

Live Gamer's scalable, white-label virtual economy platform will help GameHouse manage its virtual goods catalogs and storefronts, user policy configurations, and other merchandising elements. Game House says it chose Live Gamer's solution for its "advanced toolset and track record in the industry".

"GameHouse has raised the bar for social gaming online and on mobile," says Live Gamer president and co-founder Andrew Schneider. "We look forward to helping optimize GameHouse's revenue, increase ARPU, and offer its users the best possible microtransaction experience."

Every other week, we examine the most popular Facebook games (according to monthly active users), looking at the top titles and developers on the social network to see who's attracting or losing players.

The most popular title on Facebook, Zynga's Farmville, shrunk by 800,000 monthly users in the past two weeks, but at a total of 61.6 million players, it still has double the audience of the second biggest app, and that loss is much less than what it's suffered in recent weeks since the social network's app notification changes.

Texas HoldEm Poker at #2, another Zynga app (get used to seeing that developer's name in this week's tally), lost around half a million players and now has a total of 27.9 million users. Treasure Isle, also from the FarmVille studio, dropped from #3 to #5 after losing 1.1 million islanders -- its total is now at 19.2 million.

Taking Treasure Isle's spot is Zynga's FrontierVille, which has managed to climb to #3 on the chart and pick up 20.7 million gamers, almost 4 million more than its count two weeks ago, in just six weeks since its launch.

Zynga has three other titles in the top ten: Cafe World at #4, minus 243,623 patrons with a 20 million total; Mafia Wars Game at #6, less 226,066 mobsters with a 17.9 million total; and PetVille at #10, giving up 353,581 virtual pet owners with a 14 million total.

The only non-Zynga titles in the top ten are MindJolt Games at #7, losing 933,681 players for a 17.6 million total; Electronic Arts' Pet Society, less 192,318 users for a 14.1 million total; and RockYou's non-game Birthday Cards at #10, which parted with more than 2 million celebrators for a 14 million total.

You can see the full list of the top 20 Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts after the break:

In a plentiful week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at Harmonix, Armature Studios 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:

Bethesda Softworks: Senior Brand Manager
"The Senior Brand Manager will work closely with product development to make sure our games meet and exceed consumer expectations and are commercially viable, achieve profitability and ROI goals, are well positioned in the marketplace, have a strategic marketing plan, and are brought to market successfully and managed throughout their lifecycle as ongoing brands."

CCP China: Senior Backend Programmer
"The Senior Backend Programmer will be responsible for leading a team in developing backend server side game systems for the Dust 514 title. Successful candidates will have experience developing data intensive systems that can run at scale. Experience leading a team from a technical perspective is a big plus."

Developer Omgpop says its self-titled online casual gaming portal now has more than three million members since its launch in late 2006, with its active users playing a total of over one million minutes a day.

Formerly known as i'minlikewithyou, the free-to-play portal features multiplayer titles that users can enjoy with their friends or other community members. Players can also share photos, chat with each other, adopt virtual pets, and buy power-ups/upgrades/profile customizations with the site's Coins and Cash virtual currencies.

The New York City-based company's CEO Dan Porter says it's received a steady stream of acquisition offers recently, but has so far turned them all down, according to a report from Business Insider.

"A number of the large social game companies have talked to us, [but] we've not been interested in trading our stock for their stock or being another acquisition in a series of acquisitions, especially as things are going great for us," said Porter. "We have also been approached by several major media companies looking to get into the social games space but given our growth are holding out right now."

Omgpop says it plans to launch some of its games on Facebook and other social platforms sometime in the newt few months. Porter said he's cautious about the launch on Facebook, as he sees the social network as a "crowded market".

Expanding its efforts to encourage game developers to release titles for its platform, Hi5 has launched a new Developer Portal that aims to help creators integrate their content on the social network.

In its announcement for the portal, Hi5 points out that "other networks" have been shutting down viral channels that help titles acquire and re-engage players -- clearly a reference to Facebook's recent movies to restrict "notification spam" from application, a change that causing the audiences for many of the site's most popular games to shrink dramatically.

Hi5 says that its new portal and Game Developer Program, which launched last May, take the opposite approach and are actually opening up new viral channels that are designed to help developers drive acquisition and monetization of their games. The social network says it's invested heavily in creating new hooks for promoting developers' content.

The company added that studios now have access to Virtual Goods and Gifts API that hook into its gift economy (this is in addition to its existing Payments API). With this support, third-party games on the social network can provide gifts and other virtual goods that persists on user profile pages, thus triggering "the viral channels that get new content discovered."

Developers can also access OpenSocial/Facebook-compatible API documentation for "all integration points, sample source code, reference guides on promoting and monetizing games on hi5, revenue share terms, and distribution agreements". They can submit their games and apps for approval directly from the portal, and manage their Hi5 titles from one place.

"With the release of our new developer portal and support for Facebook-compatible APIs, it is now nearly frictionless for developers to publish their games in our network," says Hi5's CTO and president Alex St. John. "As of today, anybody who has made the investment to create a social media game is simply throwing money away if they don't publish it on hi5 as quickly as possible. It's virtually effortless."