Last week saw a veritable explosion of launches and news centered around companies that are merging social networks, cash payouts and gaming. It’s the new frontier, apparently. Anyway we had trouble keeping them all straight and we figured you may have, too, so here’s a brief roundup of the newer players in this space.

iWON

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Two acclaimed boutique game studios recently released music-based games for the iPod, and I hope they are pioneers of a new frontier. The iPod interface offers such intriguing possibilities for play style, and with 100 million versions of the iPod sold, the install base is quite large! NanaOn-sha’s Musika and Harmonix’s Phase both import songs from your playlist and can both be purchased through the iTunes music store — but that’s where the similarity ends.

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The market for online games in China shows no signs of cooling off as NetDragon, an online games developer, this week reported a nearly 2,700 percent profit increase, to $35.8 million, over the same nine-month period last year.

NetDragon’s earnings growth is based on three popular titles: Conquer Online, Eudemons Online and Zero Online. The boom, more generally, of millions of PRC citizens coming online and the resulting increase in player base helped send NetDragon’s profit margin higher by 5.8 percent to 94.5 percent in the period ended Sept. 30.

China’s online game market reached $803 million in revenues last year, according to local media. Research firms are predicting that revenue will easily break $1 billion in 2008, and continue to grow. Given that online games took in $3.8 billion in revenue globally last year, China’s piece is a pretty big slice of the pie.

There are growing opportunities for foreign-developed games in this market, too — just 60 percent of the market is made up of domestically developed and operated games. Western-developed World of Warcraft has made a significant impact there, signing on 1.5 million new players in just the first month of its release in 2005; as of March 31 of this year, its registered accounts in China totaled 7.5 million. The game’s Chinese operator, The9, is one of the three biggest online game companies in the country, after Shanda Interactive, which licensed the Korean-developed mega-hit Legend of Mir 2in 2001, and NetEase, with their popular MMO, Westward Journey.

Jack Myers posted a rather long article this morning chronicling the trials of a 13-year-old girl who recently had her avatar stolen in the casual anime-styled MMO Gaia Online. While it’s true that there are now virtual characters with virtual possessions that translate into real dollars, the article sensationalizes a problem that is hardly new. The scam is known as phishing, and it remains one of the surest ways to part a fool with his password.

But the dynamics do change when there are kids involved. Although companies warn all players against giving out their passwords, minors who go on to get scammed present a special PR problem. No one wants unhappy kids complaining on message boards and, even worse, to the press, and companies will have to start going the extra mile to ensure greater security measures in user accounts.

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We all love the Wii — gamers, game developers, marketers — in theory, anyway. But mine has been collecting dust since the spring, and the ardor of developers has cooled as well.

Sure, there was Metroid Prime — an excellent game, the first solid shooter for the console, but decidedly not the type of game that will please those housewives and grandfathers featured in Wii’s much-touted advertising campaign. The same goes for the charming but hardcore Super Mario Galaxy, due to be released in North America on Monday. But there are nearly 5 million Wiis out there in North America alone, and 13.5 million worldwide. What are all those Wii owners going to play?

Here are three ways Nintendo can bring the Wii back to the party this winter:

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For anyone out there who remains unconvinced as to how important the casual gaming market is, the latest report by the Casual Games Association may help change your mind. The casual games industry rakes in $2.25 billion a year, according to the org’s latest research, with growth estimated at a whopping 20 percent.

As the report outlines, over 200 million people play casual games on the Internet each month. And it’s the only sector of gaming that reflects an appropriate gender balance: The ratio of men to women is nearly even, at 48.3 percent to 51.7 percent, respectively, yet 74 percent of people who pay to play casual games are women. In other words, casual gaming is an area of enormous potential for the gaming industry…if only the industry can avoid some potential pitfalls along the way.

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Outspark, a San Francisco-based casual games publisher with offices in Seoul, South Korea, launched its North American games portal yesterday. Like Nexon’s South Korean-developed MapleStory, Outspark games will be free to play — in addition to advertising built into the games and the portal, the company will rely on micro-transactions of virtual goods sales to generate revenue.

Their first game, Fiesta, published by OnsOn Soft in Asia, is an MMO currently in open beta. Outspark, which secured $4 million in funding earlier this spring from Altos Ventures and Doll Capital Management, plans to work with other developers to publish community-oriented multiplayer casual games as well.

I put a few questions to CEO Susan Choe and Chief Studio Officer Nick Foster yesterday to get a better sense of the company’s plans.

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