Multimedia group RealNetworks reported a 5 percent drop in revenues for its Games division during Q2 2010, and announced the promotion of chief revenue officer Matt Hulett as the new head of that unit.

The company's revenues from its Games business during Q2 2010 (ending June 30th) was $28.1 million, 5 percent less compared to the $29.6 million the department generated in the same period last year.

RealNetworks' total revenues for the quarter from all of its units came out to $88.9 million, down from $135.7 million in Q2 2009 (includes $40.5 million in revenue from Real's music business and Rhapsody joint venture, which wasn't factored into its results this time around due to a restructuring of Rhapsody).

For the third quarter of 2010, the firm expects its overall revenue to be "slightly lower" sequentially and less than its Q3 2009 amount, attributing the decline primarily to "softness" in its Games business. It also predicts that its future revenue statements will be affected by foreign currency trends.

With its quarterly results announcement, RealNetworks revealed the appointment of Matt Hulett as the new head of its Games business, as John Barbour steps down. Hulett was previously CRO of the department, and has held executive roles at Expedia and Shockwave.com

"Given the urgent need to pivot our Games business to social and online games, we think it is critical to have a leader based here in Seattle," says RealNetworks CEO and president Bob Kimball. "Matt has the right combination of leadership skills, online business experience and support from the team to refocus our Games business on the growth markets, including social games."

Hulett's promotion comes a month after the company laid off most of its internal PC casual game studio GameHouse (Super Collapse and Little Shop) as part of a wider series of layoffs and a restructuring plan designed to "reduce the spans and layers of management to create greater efficiency, teamwork, and customer focus".

RealNetworks retained its casual/social game team in the Netherlands, and said that its Seattle-based GameHouse studio will continue to operate its game portal, create titles for Facebook, and pursue second-party development contracts.

"We made strong progress transforming RealNetworks during the second quarter," adds Kimball. "Our restructuring efforts are ahead of plan. In the first six months of the year, we cut more than $30 million in annualized operating expenses from our ongoing businesses."

"Now it is time to focus on growing the business by improving our sales and marketing of existing products and building a strong pipeline of innovative products for the long term."

Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications is placing restrictions on public internet access and banning ads for online games following complaints that games help lead to juvenile crime, according to the country's state-run news agency. Minister Le Doan Hop announced the decision on Tuesday.

The Vietnam News agency said citizens are concerned about online games' "negative influences on the youth." The restrictions follow public outcry that blamed increasing reports of juvenile crime and school truancy on online games and their allegedly addictive allure.

The government in effect said it would cut off internet access from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. to shops that offer public PC use. Officials will also issue a temporary stop on licensing of online games.

The restrictions are valid through the end of the year, by which time the ministry said it expects the government to approve draft online game regulations. In Vietnam, there are 22 licensed gaming companies and 93 games, according to the report.

Long-term potential solutions to the alleged negative effects of youth online gaming include electronic IDs used to manage citizen's internet usage. Director of the ministry's Electronic Information and Broadcasting Department Luu Vu Hai said the IDs could also help regulate subscribers to mobile devices.

The Ho Chi Minh City executive council is also pushing for limitations on games with violent, gambling and pornographic content.

Vietnam's restrictions come less than a month after China's Ministry of Culture said it would ban online game companies from using sex to sell their products, and also ban the promotional use of violence and gambling in advertising.

Veteran game designer and erstwhile cosmonaut Richard "Lord British" Garriott has prevailed in his legal action against former employer NCsoft, scoring $28 million in a dispute over stock options and the circumstances of his departure from the company.

A federal court yesterday ruled that NCsoft had deprived Garriott of profits on his stock options by mis-categorizing his exit. The Ultima creator, whose last project with NCsoft was the disappointing Tabula Rasa, left the company in November 2008, a month after his return from his space tourism expedition on board the International Space Station.

In his suit, Garriott had claimed he was 'forced out' of NCsoft and that he had "objected to his dismissal," yet the company claimed he left voluntarily -- a decision that meant Garriott had to quickly sell his stock options in a disadvantageous market or lose them altogether, whereas had he been categorized as terminated, he would have had 10 years to divest.

According to a report in Austin's Statesman, the trial lasted three-and-a-half days, and the jury spent three hours deliberating before making the decision to award Garriott the $28 million -- less than the $47 he had been seeking, but an amount equal to the profit he missed out on by having to sell quickly.

Garriott, whose newest venture is a Facebook gaming start-up called Portalarium, said he was "very pleased with the final award". South Korea-headquarted NCsoft said via its attorney, however, that it "will be considering all options for next steps in the legal process."

According to the report, Garriott first heard he would lose his job when he was spending time in quarantine in Russia following his space trip. Just after he returned, NCsoft announced it would soon close Tabula Rasa, an MMO launched under Garriott's stewardship a year prior that became a commercial failure, with only about a year on the market.

Free-to-play online publisher Nexon America (Maplestory, Dungeon Fighter Online) revealed that its revenues grew 26 percent for the second quarter of 2010 ending last June.

While Nexon America, which is the Stateside arm of South Korean developer and publisher Nexon Corp., hasn't yet provided exact revenue and profit numbers for Q2 2010, it noted that in June alone, its revenues were 36 percent higher compared to the same period last year.

This announcement continues a trend of increasing revenues for the North American division -- last May, the firm enjoyed an increase in revenues to $45.5 million for 2009, a 31 percent growth over the $34.3 million it cashed the previous year

Nexon America's free-to-play titles include MapleStory, which claims more than seven million registered users in the region; Combat Arms, which has over four milion registered users; and Mabinogi with one million users. It also recently launched Dungeon Fighter Online here, and will begin a closed beta for Vindictus next month.

"Our player base and revenues continue to expand, which tells us that gamers find that our free-to-play business model fits their play needs," said Nexon America's CEO Daniel Kim, according to a report from Games Beat.

Academic, author and game designer Ian Bogost is a little bit worried that his latest game, Cow Clicker -- a simple Facebook title simply about clicking on cows -- might receive more attention than anything he's done to date. If that turns out to be the case, it'll be an interesting turn of irony, the sort that motivates the sometimes-controversial designer: this is because Cow Clicker is a satire that asks players and developers alike to examine the explosive popularity of Facebook games.

Cow Clicker, Bogost tells Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, was initially conceived as an alternative to a straight lecture presentation he was asked to give at an NYU event; with only ten minutes to speak, and (as usual for Bogost) "a lot to say", why not show instead of tell? Cow Clicker was intended to present the four issues that Bogost says "concern" him most about Facebook games: "enframing, compulsion, optionalism, and destroyed time," described in detail on his blog post about the title.

Gameplay in Cow Clicker is insultingly simple -- Bogost has described it as "Facebook games distilled to their essence." Users obtain a cow on which they can click every six hours, and every time they click, they earn more opportunities to click their cow or their friends' cows. Users can buy custom "premium" cows or buy their way out of the six-hour delay with the game's currency, "Mooney" (Bogost claims that the coincidence with the last name of Zynga's vice president is nothing more than sheer accident).

"It's particularly easy to be a negative critic, to talk down about something from on high," he says. "By making a game to deliver that message, I hoped it would be taken more seriously." So while Cow Clicker is, in a nutshell, a criticism of the social game industry, "that's not all it is," he adds. "It's also a social game! Which is counterintuitive, isn't it?"

Continue reading "Interview: Cow Clicker Yields Ruminations On Social Gaming's Tense Battle Lines" »

Realtime Worlds, developer of APB and the original Crackdown, has announced Project: MyWorld, a PC platform that combines social media with a virtual representation of the real world.

More of a social platform than a game, Project: MyWorld uses data from GIS (geographic information system) mapping services to create a 3D render of entire countries. Users can then alter the features of cities and towns using in-game tools to make buildings and other structures more accurately mimic the real world.

Project: MyWorld uses a Wiki-like system to ensure that users do not alter the virtual world in ways that stray too far from reality. Realtime Worlds released a walkthrough video, demonstrating tools that allow users to alter the dimensions, colors, textures, and external features of buildings.

The project integrates several forms of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google, and Loopt, though there are few details about how these services will work within the platform.

Users can also play several types of casual games within the virtual locations, including fishing, driving, farming, and flying.

“We see Project: MyWorld as the next generation of social game platforms…we see it has the intersection between virtual worlds, online gaming and social media,” explains Sean Dugan, design director of Project: MyWorld.

Realtime Worlds hopes to open the Project: MyWorld platform to users early next year.

Every other week, we'll examine the fastest growing Facebook games (according to monthly active users), looking at which titles and developers are having the most success attracting new players on the social network.

Though Lyore Network's QuizBone doesn't seem to really qualify as a game, the quiz-making title was still the fastest growing app listed in Facebook's "Games" category, doubling its audience to 2.9 million after gaining 1.5 million new users in the last week.

QuizBone managed to overtake Zynga's FrontierVille, which held that #1 spot almost every week since its launch in June. The pioneering sim grew by 6 percent and now has 21.9 million players, 1.1 million of which just started playing within the past seven days.

At #3, Watercooler's Kingdoms of Camelot grew its userbase as it added 970,122 new players, now up to a total of 4 million. The kingdom-building simulator spent the past month below 3 million users but experienced a 32 percent surge for its audience recently.

Playdom's offbeat game Fanglies (#4), which launched earlier this month, more than tripled its total to 1.1 million users after attracting 838,583 new players. Apparently, gamers have taken to the idea of a city-building sim starring cartoonish vampires!

Playfish/Electronic Arts' Pirates Ahoy, another early July release, shot up to #5 and enjoyed a 1,425 percent growth this week, picking up 796,939 new swashbucklers and expanding its total crew to 852,846 players. The new title invites players to sail with their friends and search for treasures.

ZipZapPlay's Baking Life hasn't budged from its #6 spot since our last tally, bringing in 787,344 (+23 percent) new users for a total of 4.3 milion. Metrogames' clothing store management game Fashion World climbed up to #7, with 779,802 new shoppers joining for a total of 3.1 million.

Two more non-games, Windows Live Messenger and Entrevista tus Amigos, popped up on our list of Facebook's fastest growing games at #8 and #9 respectively. Popcap Games Bejeweled Blitz continues to grow on the social network, as 733,654 new gem-matchers (+7 percent) helped bring its total audience size up to 11.5 million.

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

All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData

Farmville developer Zynga has teamed up with telecommunications/media corporation Softbank to create Zynga Japan, a joint venture focusing on social games and the local mobile market.

Along with announcing the Tokyo-based joint venture, Softbank revealed that it's completed a previously reported $150 million investment in Zynga, boosting the San Francisco's total amount of venture backing raised since its founding three years ago up to almost $370 million.

With the establishing of Zynga Japan, the developer is taking its first step into Japan's growing internet and mobile businesses. The joint venture looks to tap into Japan's history of gaming while leveraging Softbank's mobile and web technology to produce what the two firms hope will be "the best social games in the market".

"We're excited to partner with Softbank to bring Zynga's social games to Japan and gain insights from the Japanese market," says Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus. "As one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Softbank is bringing the mobile internet to consumers making the social web more accessible to people everywhere."

The Lego Group announce that it's selected newly opened studio Dire Wolf Digital to produce a trading card game based on its upcoming Lego Universe massively multiplayer online game.

This agreement with Dire Wolf allows the company to not only create a physical collectible card game, but also digital products for PC, Mac, and mobile devices. The studio doesn't plans to release the Lego Universe card game until 2011, while the NetDevil-developed MMO will launch on October 26, 2010.

Based in Denver, the studio is headed by Sony Online Entertainment Denver's former head Scott Martins, and is staffed by veterans from SOE and Worlds Apart Productions (acquired by SOE in 2006). Martins and his team have previously specialized in creating online trading card games like Legends of Norrath and the Free Realms TCG.

The developer says it has an "Anytime, Anyplace" approach for its technology, which is designed to enable consumers to "play from multiple types of clients (web/social, mobile, console), all connecting to a single back-end." Dire Wolf's deal with the Lego Group allows it to potentially implement this concept with its Lego Universe project.

"Creating a game with the Lego Group and NetDevil is an exciting opportunity, allowing us to work with a beloved brand and great business partners," says Martins. "The creativity and ‘build anything’ spirit of the brand and Lego Universe fit perfectly with trading card games, where players are limited only by their imaginations."