Ex-members of Rockstar Games in Vienna have announced the formation and launch of their new social games development studio based in Vienna, Austria, dubbed Socialspiel.

Founding CEO Helmut Hutterer also announced their first title, a competitive puzzler named Push, which is launching later this Summer on Facebook, Netlog and several other social networks as partnerships get closed and announced. Hutterer also went on to say

“After almost 10 years of developing big budget, AAA titles such as Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne for Rockstar Games it is a breath of fresh air to focus on developing independent games with a direct connection to our fans and players on social networks around the World,” says CEO Hutterer. “Our goal at Socialspiel ( http://socialspiel.com) is to develop richly crafted online games, with high quality production values and appealing experiences for players and their friends to enjoy throughout their daily life online”.

Read more at the Socialspiel Blog

Rupture, the social network for World of Warcraft players run by Napter-founder Shawn Fanning has gone live, allowing users to meet with real life people who play the most popular MMO in the universe. Rupture allows you to automatically publish your character and guild profiles to your profile page, as well as share pictures, chat with friends and recruit new people into your fold.

Read more: Rupture

It’s only a matter of time before the benefits of web 2.0 are recognized and adopted by the games industry, and those times they are a coming. Kongregate is a flash games hub with social networking-style community features allowing game developers to connect and interact with players and players to easily connect with and play against their friends. Developers are free and welcome to add their own games to Kongregate (great for online RPG, RTS and casino games developers)and are even compensated via shares of any microtransactions or advertising revenue while keeping full rights to their games. A great start to the future of casual social gaming.

Read more: Kongregate

As if the plethora of World of Warcraft community sites, forums, and MySpace pages weren’t enough, a new social networking site has started dedicated to World of Warcraft and it’s players. The site is called Warcraft Social and allows World of Warcraft players to create user profiles, including pictures, create guild groups in order to connect with guild members MySpace-style, among many other Warcraft-specific options. Though this is not an officially supported network, I wonder why more massive multiplayers aren’t offering first party social networks in addition to their other community-building efforts. Forums are so web 1.0 man.

Read More: Warcraft Social

Second Life, the 3D social networking virtual world where users are able to create alter-egos of themselves, living out their days running virtual brothels, hunting ranges and multi-level marketing schemes, has passed the 1 million subscriber mark. Though, this also counts free accounts, which take a whopping 15 seconds to open, over 400,000 accounts have logged in within the last 60 days, a good sign that many accounts are active. How Second Life will fare next year remains to be seen, but for now, it seems like the Linden-family are going strong.

Second Life reaches 1 million subscriber mark

Digg has become a powerhouse in the social linking world and with that power comes many imitators, some good, many bad. We’re happy to have found a good one, recently released and covering game development and the games industry only. Registered users are able to add and vote on stories from around the games industry, from technical talks to gossipy blogosphere rumours. Best wishes on a job well done DevBump.

Read more: DevBump – A Digg-like system for game developers