Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.

The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20 percent in future years, the report says.

The mainstream remains the awkwardly named sector of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In October, six out of the 10 most popular online games in China are MMORPG games, according to the report. World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) still tops the list with the most registered players and peak simultaneous online users. But the current government regulatory fighting over its Chinese license, held by Netease, may yet have a negative impact on the game, according to the report.

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While Tony Hawk has been a skateboarding legend since the 1980s, today there is a generation of kids who know him for his eponymous videogames.

Starting with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999, the Tony Hawk series has spawned more than 10 titles–among the more successful gaming franchises, and popular among skateboarders who play videogames as well as gamers who have never stepped on a board.

Mr. Hawk came to the Journal’s office Tuesday to show off his new game, Tony Hawk: Ride. Players control a virtual skater through a motion-sensing board instead of a joystick, following a growing number of interactive, stand-up games such as Guitar Hero and nearly everything on the Wii.

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Since first releasing the Xbox nearly a decade ago, Microsoft (MSFT) has been targeting your living room. From videogames to film downloads to the coming Facebook add-on for their Xbox Live service, the software maker has rolled out features that aim to shorten the link between your computer and your TV set. Later this month, Xbox Live will feature another addition: a live game show.

On Nov. 19, Microsoft Game Studios is starting a new season of the multiplayer game show “1 vs. 100,” after a highly-popular demo version earlier this summer. The game is based on the popular show of the same name that started in the Netherlands and has since aired in more than two dozen countries. In the game and on the show, a randomly selected contestant must defeat “the Mob” of 100 other players to collect a cash prize.

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Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” a first-person-shooter videogame, is coming out Nov. 10, and anticipation is mounting.

Specialty retailer GameStop has been taking pre-orders since last April, much earlier than most games. “It’s the biggest launch in our history, bigger than ‘Halo 3,’” said the company’s head of merchandising and marketing, Tony Bartel, comparing the game to the blockbuster shooter that Microsoft (MSFT) released in 2007.

GameStop stores usually call customers who have pre-ordered games the night before launch. Bartel said, this time, it will be “talking to more people on Monday night than the total amount of ‘Call of Duty: World at War’ that sold in the first month.”

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Videogame publishers, pushing to expand their businesses, are making games that target girls and women a new industry battleground.

This holiday season, more games than ever are being geared toward female players. Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) is releasing the latest installment of its “Littlest Pet Shop” game for young girls and introducing a series of fashion-themed games called “Charm Girls Club” for older girls later this month. Sony Corp. (SNE) in August packaged a lilac version of its PlayStation Portable device with a “Hannah Montana” game, based on the popular television show about a girl and her secret pop career.

Publishers also will target women with workout games. Ubisoft Entertainment SA is introducing “Your Shape,” a personal-training game, and “Just Dance,” a dancing game, in November. Nintendo Co. hit the market with “Wii Fit Plus,” a sequel to its popular fitness game, in September.

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Fantasy video games and heavy metal music seem like a perfect marriage, given that both often rely on Tolkien-esque imagery and create elaborate, male-centric alternate worlds.

But while games use metal songs in their trailers, during play the soundtrack usually transitions into orchestral music. “Brutal Legend” on the other hand, a game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 that’s being released tomorrow by Electronic Arts (ERTS), is all metal, all the time.

The game’s creators, Double Fine Productions, have assembled what may be the most extensive metal soundtrack anywhere–108 songs by 75 different bands covering a range of sub-genres.

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Former lawyer Jack Thompson has sued Facebook for allowing anti-Thompson groups to post messages that have caused him “great harm and distress.”

Thompson was permanently disbarred in September 2008 but that didn’t stop his vocal criticism of the videogame industry, nor did it soften the attitude of videogamers toward Thompson and his strident rhetoric, many of whom have come together in Facebook groups to share their frustration with his antics. But Thompson says he feels threatened by some of the messages posted by those groups and on Tuesday, he filed suit against Facebook for letting it happen.

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On Wednesday, a startup called OnLive that’s generating a lot of buzz–and skepticism–in the videogame world raised a new round of financing from AT&T (T), Warner Bros. and others. We spoke to OnLive founder Steve Perlman, a well-known serial entrepreneur, about the investment (which wasn’t quantified) and some of the implications if OnLive or startups like it are successful.

OnLive has developed technology that it says will allow consumers to play graphically rich videogames without owning high-end PCs or consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that are normally required for such titles. Instead, OnLive plans to run games on powerful remote servers in data centers and pipe high-definition game graphics over the Internet to consumers, who can play them on low-end PCs and Macs or through an inexpensive OnLive device connected to their televisions.

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Hardware freaks flocked to San Francisco last week to hear Intel (INTC) talk about microprocessors, the electronic brains in PCs. But Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) made some pretty brainy claims of its own.

The smaller Silicon Valley microprocessor maker expanded its focus several years ago by buying ATI Technologies, known for the chips called graphics processing units that generate realistic-looking scenery in videogames. AMD says the high-end GPU it announced last week sports a whopping 2.15 billion transistors.

That’s more features than any chip now for sale by Intel, which prides itself on packing the most tiny components on a given square of silicon. AMD used a production process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) that creates lines of circuitry measured at 40 nanometers, or billionths of a meter; that is a bit finer than the most advanced chips currently on the market from Intel, which have features rated at 45 nanometers.

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In the near future, consumers will be playing videogames without controllers, giving directions to lifelike avatars and waving files from screen to screen a la “Minority Report,” according to Microsoft (MSFT).

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the software giant’s online audience business group, made these predictions during Mixx, an interactive advertising conference in New York. His first demo was of Project Natal, an Xbox 360 initiative that focuses on controller-free gaming.

Gamers kicked their opponent by making a roundhouse of their own, and drove in a racing game by air-steering. Some videogames, like soccer, will take advantage of full-body motion capture, and a skateboarding game will let players scan their own board, which their avatar can then step on.

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U.S. video game sector sales fell 29 percent in August to $848.9 million, down from $1.19 billion a year ago, according to market research firm NPD Group. That includes a 37 percent drop in video game hardware, a 26 percent drop in software sales and a 12 percent decline in video game accessories. It was the fifth consecutive monthly drop. Sales for the year to date are down 14 percent versus the same period in 2008.

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Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.

That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

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A recent report released by the USC Annenberg School for Communication says that videogames don’t represent American society any better than television does. In fact, it says that some cases videogames do a worse job.

The study claimed that while Latinos are making “modest gains” in television, fewer than three percent of videogame characters were “recognizably Hispanic,” when looking at the top 150 videogames in one year across nine platforms, giving extra weight to the more popular titles.

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In the complex tango between movies and video games, Hollywood may be losing its lead.

Motion picture studios have had a penchant for adapting games into movies all the way back to 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.,” which starred Bob Hoskins as the mustachioed hero Mario and Dennis Hopper as the villainous King Koopa, with varying degrees of success.

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Many game developers are starting to find that games with illusory challenges sell better than those with real challenge. They believe that what gamers want most is an experience that conveys the feeling of accomplishing a difficult task, but without the difficulty. Games like this have spawned a new genre of simplified ‘parody’ games that highlight the techniques used to provide this illusion of accomplishment.

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