Seattle - Big Fish Games, a provider of online games and interactive entertainment, announced on Friday that it has landed a new $83.3 million round of funding, from General Catalyst Partners, Balderton Capital and Salmon River Capital.

San Francisco and Seattle. At the OMMA Gaming Conference in San Francisco yesterday, Alex St. John, CEO of Wild Tangent, opened up the day's discussion by making the bold statement that the game console is dead. At Casual Connect in Seattle this morning, Trip Hawkins, CEO, Digital Chocolate and founder of Electronic Arts, said that the iPhone and new touch-screen displays have made the mobile medium into one of the most interesting areas for the gaming industry today. Paul Thelen, Founder & CEO, Big Fish Games, gave a more balanced overview of the state of the industry. He said that the gaming industry is actually growing in a number of different categories and on multiple platforms at once. In fact, Thelen has identified 2,380 distinct areas in which a gaming company could possibly focus.

Seattle - Big Fish Games, a developer and distributor of online games, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Thinglefin, a developer of massively multiplayer online games.

San Jose, Calif. - Japan's Namco Networks, a developer and publisher of mobile games, announced on Monday that it has signed an agreement to distribute casual online games publisher Big Fish Games' titles for mobile phones in North America. The first title under the deal, "Atlantis Sky Patrol," is set to launch on U.S. mobile networks in the winter of 2007.

Seattle - The Casual Games Special Interest Group (SIG) of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) on Wednesday announced an initiative to facilitate the sharing of sales and revenue data between developers, publishers, aggregators and distributors of casual video games.

Seattle - Casual games developer and distributor Big Fish Games on Tuesday announced plans to launch an advertising revenue-sharing program for its more than 400 online game developer partners. The company said it is implementing a new tracking technology that can track ad revenue generated by individual games, and will pay a royalty rate comparable to rates earned from downloadable game purchases. "Developers have historically only received a percentage-based revenue share for sales of game downloads, while game portals have traditionally kept 100 percent of the advertising revenues generated by their online versions of the games," said Big Fish CEO Paul Thelen. "We're excited to change this model for the better and offer developers a significant opportunity to share in this revenue stream."

Germantown, Md. - AWS Convergence Technologies, creators of the WeatherBug desktop weather application, announced on Wednesday that it has expanded its Sponsor Select program to game publishers, enabling gamers to control the advertisers they'd like to see before their game begins. Maryland-based AWS has been using Sponsor Select with its WeatherBug application since 2001, and said online game publisher Big Fish Games is among its first game industry partners for the service. Advertisers will pay only when they are selected by users.