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Real Networks, long-time maker of casual PC games, is moving into the game console arena for the first time with a new downloadable title for Nintendo’s Wii.

Real Networks announced today “Boingz,” a game with cute characters that you can move around the screen as if you were shooting rubber bands. It is a WiiWare title, meaning you can download it to your Wii via Nintendo’s online store. The game was developed by independent developer NinjaBee (a division of Wahoo Studios) for Real Networks.

“This lets us broaden our horizons,” said Frank Rogan of Real Networks. “This is just the first console title.”

Rogan said that Real Networks will make other games as well, including a retail Wii console title and two Nintendo DS games.

A downloadable Wii title is not a big departure for Real Networks, which makes downloadable games for the PC. Real Networks’ RealArcade is one of the most popular casual game destinations on the web. But it shows that casual game companies can cross from one platform to another when the content makes sense without too much difficulty. It also shows that Nintendo’s WiiWare platform has become a viable business alternative for third party game publishers and developers.

Marc Franklin, a Nintendo spokesman, said that more than 33 WiiWare games have become available since the debut of the online store platform last year. This batch includes a number of games made by small independent game shops. One of the biggest hits is indie game developer XGen Studios‘ “Defend Your Castle.” Nintendo’s WiiWare platform competes with Sony’s PlayStation Network for the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360.

Nintendo also announced that Tetris Online will publish Tetris Party, a new single and multiplayer Tetris game with 18 different versions of the 1980s-era block-stacking game.

The party is on for video game entrepreneurs. Big Fish Games just raised the bar for the industry by reeling in a huge venture round by video game standards.

The Seattle-based casual downloadable games company raised $83 million in a first round of financing from Balderton Capital, General Catalyst Partners, and Salmon River Capital. That’s the biggest round I can remember for a game company. The deal is the largest in the state of Washington this year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. That’s pretty impressive, given the state of the economy. But the game industry has proven resilient during the recession.

This will certainly prompt questions about whether games have hit a bubble peak. But Jeremy Lewis, chief executive of Big Fish, said in an interview that his company is profitable and its execution is solid. Big Fish reported $50.8 million in revenue last year and has grown revenues more than 100 percent a year in the past three years.

“Do I think the market is frothy?” Lewis said. “In some areas of online games, that may be true. I’m not an expert on that. But we don’t feel that is the case with our own company.”

But the surprising thing here is that Big Fish has a business model that is considered old and decrepit among the newest game startups. Big Fish uses the “try before you buy” downloadable games business model. You can download a game from Big Fish and play it for free. But after an hour, you have to decide whether you want to pay or move on to the next one.

Popular titles include “Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate,” “Build-a-lot 2: Town of the Year,” “Ranch Rush,” and “Azada: Ancient Magic.”

These days, ad-supported models supported by companies such as NeoEdge Networks or Mochi Media are more popular. Korean and Chinese online game companies have adopted a “free to play” model, where they monetize their games through sales of virtual goods. But Lewis said that the older model has served the company well.

Big Fish was founded by former Real Networks game executive Paul Thelen in 2002. It now has 310 people. And, no, they’re not in China or India. Big Fish has bucked the outsourcing trend as well, with all but four of its people in the Seattle area. More than 500 independent developers work with the company now, providing games that Big Fish distributes on its web site.

More than 1 million games are played every day and 50 percent of sales are overseas. The company is launching a version of its site in Japan and has expanded to various parts of Europe. There is no particular plan for the new funds, but Lewis said they give the company a very strong balance sheet. And although he said the company has no acquisition plans per se, Lewis said the company has the funds to acquire if it needs to. He looks at his big fat wallet as giving him “strategic flexibility.”

Prior to today, the company raised $8.7 million in angel funds — in two different tranches — in 2005. Growth has been strong thanks to the extended reach of broadband, a growing interest in casual games among all demographic groups, overseas expansion, and strong social networking.

Big Fish has tried to be a MySpace of games by creating reward programs for those who spread games in a viral fashion, sharing them with friends. After a year, players get rewards. And they can chat with each other in forums built into the site. The company has partnerships with Activision Blizzard, which publishes some of the company’s biggest hits in retail stores, and Nintendo, which recently published “Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir” for the Nintendo DS. Mystery Case Files was a big hit on Big Fish.

Rivals include casual game companies of all sorts, including Real Networks and Electronic Arts’ Pogo.com division. Compete.com shows that Pogo.com has far more unique visitors a month than Big Fish, while the traffic at Disney’s Club Penguin is equal to that of Big Fish.

Lewis said that the company continues to experiment with new business models, and he noted that more than half of the company’s staff is dedicated to research and development.

Real Networks has a nifty new service dubbed RealDVD. You can basically load all of your DVDs into your computer’s hard drive — legally — so that you can watch them on the computer.

RealDVD takes an exact copy of a DVD and puts it on the hard drive. It looks up the cover art for the movie so you can see it on a graphical menu. You can even play a movie while you’re saving it to the hard drive. For those with large collections, you can save it to an external hard drive. Those movies show up in your screen guide to your entire collection. You can sort through them by movie, genre, rating, or actor.

You can sort through the collection easily and resume movies where you were last watching them. It plays back from a hard disk drive. The limit, of course, is hard drive space. It takes maybe eight gigabytes of space to store a movie and perhaps 20 minutes to copy it to the PC. There are parental controls.

You can do the same thing with a Kaleidescape DVD storage system, but those cost $10,000 or more. Other rivals are Flip4Mac, Drive-In, Magic DVD Ripper, SlySoft, AnyDVD, and Xilisoft DVD Ripper. Kaleidescape won a legal ruling against the movie industry that paved the way for RealDVD, which is legal because it adds a layer of digital rights management and because it retains the original copy protection on the DVD. The DRM layer allows you to copy it to USB drives and view it on a total of five PCs.

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Hasbro dropped the long-expected hammer on Scrabulous today. The company sued the creators of the popular Facebook Scrabble knock-off, alleging copyright infringement.

The toy maker, which owns the Scrabble board game brand in the U.S. and Canada, also asked Facebook to take down the popular application under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Mark Blecher, a general manager at Hasbro’s game division, said in a phone call that Hasbro waited until Electronic Arts had a version of EA Scrabble ready for fans to play. (Hasbro owns the rights and has contracted with EA to make video games based on Hasbro properties). EA launched the beta version of its game last week and expects to have a final version soon. Blecher said that Hasbro began talks with Facebook earlier this year about the infringement but deferred its lawsuit because so many fans wanted a game to play. As long as EA Scrabble wasn’t ready, Scrabulous was the only choice on Facebook. Mattel owns the international rights to Scrabble and Real Networks has the rights to make an international video game based on Mattel’s international rights.

Scrabulous was created by two brothers in India, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, also names RJ Softwares. Scrabulous took off because it was an easy way for friends to stay in touch and socialize via Facebook. Players could play the game asynchronously, one turn at a time, so that it didn’t matter if the other player was online or not. Fans were ready to revolt when they heard that Scrabulous might be taken down. But Blecher said he expects fans to migrate to the EA version.

Right now, Scrabulous ranks 11th on the list of most active Facebook applications. The game has 512,961 active daily users and 3.9 million installs, according to Adonomics. Daily users is actually down from the peak, Adonomics shows.

Electronic Arts has taken many months to get its official Hasbro-licensed version of Scrabble onto the Web at Pogo.com and Facebook, but it’s launching the Pogo.com version today and will have the Facebook version out later this month. In the meantime, an unlicensed version of Scrabble created by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla of Calcutta, India, has been up on Facebook for months getting a giant head start.

The two brothers behind the unofficial version, Scrabulous, are apparently making $25,000 a month from ad revenue, but no doubt they’re going to have to pay a lot back in legal fees. Hasbro sent a take-down notice to Facebook back in January. But Facebook hasn’t taken the turn-based game down yet. The brothers were reportedly trying to sell Scrabulous, but the price was too high.

Scrabble will be the first EA-Hasbro licensed property to go live on a social networking site. It’s late, but at least EA is finally getting into one of the hottest areas of games: the convergence of online gaming and social networking.

EA Scrabble is already available on a variety of mobile phones and on the Apple iPod. EA says the Facebook version has an intuitive interface that allows head-to-head challenges with friends, family and other Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada. There are flexible speed levels and word lists for help choosing words. EA will also let users chat and enjoy dynamic animations. The latter is a feature that Scrabulous doesn’t have.

Mattel and Real Networks have the overseas rights to Scrabulous. Real Networks launched a version of Scrabble, dubbed “Scrabble by Mattel,” in April on Facebook outside the U.S. and Canada. Reports at the time showed that the Mattel-Real Networks version had very little traction.

EA struck its broad licensing deal with Hasbro last October under which EA will make games based on Hasbro’s properties. That puts the official version far behind Scrabulous, which launched in 2006 and still ranks No. 9 on the most-active Facebook applications with 451,107 active daily users.

Gary Serby, a spokesman for Hasbro, said in a statement, “Hasbro has been consistent in stating that Scrabulous infringes upon our intellectual property, and we are keeping our legal options open. Today we are focusing on the coming launch of EA’s legitimate social networking version of Scrabble. We have no further comment.”