WildTangent and T-Mobile USA are offering T-Mobile’s Android customers a choice of how they want to pay for games. Players can buy them outright, rent them, or opt for a free version that includes pre-roll advertising.

Replay Games is making the world safe for cheap jokes and even cheaper polyester double-knits. The Austin, Texas-based company has acquired the rights to the 1987 franchise "Leisure Suit Larry" and is working with the franchise’s original creator Al Lowe to bring the lovable loser to all platforms.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is sinking its teeth into free-to-play Facebook games as an extension of its television programs. Its newest is "The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In," based on the weekly travails of angst-ridden yet sexy young adults in "The Vampire Diaries."

Gamers’ social service Xfire has secured $4 million in funding, led by Intel Capital, and is splitting from its parent company Titan Gaming. This is the second significant change for Xfire in slightly over a year: Titan bought Xfire from Viacom in 2010 for significantly less than the $102 million deal that put Xfire into Viacom’s portfolio five years ago.

Kid-safe social media site Everloop has gone live with EverText, a SMS feature that is always on and protected by moderators in real time. It works across all mobile carriers and does cost anything beside whatever the mobile data plan charges. The company said EverText is the first service of its kind.

Mythic Entertainment co-founder and former CEO Mark Jacobs took the wraps off his new venture, City State Entertainment, an independent game development studio he co-founded with Andrew Meggs. The duo has been building up a team and working pretty much anonymously since March 7 on project that include a game the company plans to release before the end of the year.

One way to lure customers into physical stores is to gamify the real world, which is exactly what GameStop and Coca-Cola are doing with Scvngr and the "Happiness in Numbers" campaign. The companies say it’s the biggest real-life location-based game ever. Challenges are tasks like visiting a GameStop and taking a photo with a favorite game box and a Coke, or getting the high score on one of the in-store game kiosks and taking a picture posing with the game while holding a Coke.

GigaMedia Ltd. confirmed it received formal notice on Sept. 29 that it was in danger of being delisted. The letter from the Nasdaq Global Market came about a week after the company announced updated information on the free-to-play “SpongeBob SquarePants” massively multiplayer online game, Viacom’s first MMOG to be developed outside of the United States. The caution said that for the previous 30 consecutive business days, the bid price of GigaMedia’s common stock closed below the minimum dollar per share.