News roundup – 28/01/09

A few links of news for today :

• Nexon closes HumaNature studio (based in Canada, developers of Sugar Rush). As there were no news of the game since the end of Closed beta in December, we would be suprised if the title wasn’t cancelled.

ERRATUM :  HumaNature was producing the game, not developing it, the developer is Klei Entertainment, which is not closing. HumaNature was working on unannouced new IP games. Thanks Daniel for the corrections!

• Online gaming gets 27% traffic growth yoy according to a new Comscore report. The online gaming display ad market grows with it, and gets upmarket as the ad clutter for the category diminishes. Most impressive growth is Spil’s network with +269% growth.
• Rumour : AOL selling Bebo? (were apparently disappointed by monetization vs projections)
• Paypal joins OpenID (that can give OpenID more credibility)
• GOA adds another True Games title to their portfolio by taking care of European operations for Possibility Space’s WarriorEpic .
• Gamigo brings Hanbitsoft’s steampunk MMO NeoSteam to Europe
• New study by DFC compares  offline and online games publishers’ business models, online makes better profits , less risky.
• Gmail will have an offline option. (Convenient for anyone with a laptop, and helps overcome barriers to cloud-based service usage.)

Tags: AOL, Bebo, Gamigo, Gmail, GOA, Hanbitsoft, nexon, OpenID, Paypal, Spil Games, sugar rush, True Games, Warrior Epic