On Wednesday, Cryptic Studios and Atari announced that Jack Emmert has been appointed CEO of Cryptic Studios following the departure of former CEO John Needham. This morning, Gazillion Entertainment announced that Needham has been named CEO of the company.

Prior to joining Cryptic in 2008, Needham was the senior vice president of business development and operations at Sony Online Entertainment. He is now "extremely excited to be a part of Gazillion."

“Like the team here, I believe that in the near future, rich console-quality games will be delivered through the browser," he said. "With great creative talent like [Gazillion President and COO] David Brevik and massive brands like Marvel, we’re going to create browser-centric, free-to-play games that set a new standard for quality and deliver a deep, compelling experience.”

In similar news, Gazillion founder Rob Hutter is now chairman of the company.

David Brevik, the former president of Blizzard North and a major force behind the Diablo series and Blizzard's Battle.net service, has been promoted to president and COO of Gazillion Entertainment. Prior to his promotion, Brevik was the studio director and project lead for Gazillion's upcoming Marvel Universe MMO.

In addition, Jeff Lind was named vice president and studio head for Secret Identity, the Gazillion studio that's developing Marvel Universe. Lind was formerly a director of development for several projects at Electronic Arts and the director of engineering for Turbine West.

Gazillion is a developer and publisher of various MMOs, including Marvel Universe, Marvel Super Hero Squad, LEGO Universe and Jumpgate Evolution. We've been excited at the thought of a Marvel Universe MMO since Gazillion announced its partnership with Marvel Entertainment back in March 2009, so we'll definitely be keeping an eye on how these developments affect the game.

For more details, check out the press release after the jump.

An article on gameindustry.biz reports Gazillion Entertainment, the publisher that is working to bring the Marvel Universe MMO to life, is partnering with Abu Dhabi Media Company to create a joint MMO game studio in Abu Dhabi. According to a press release, the studio will be the first in the region and will be built to create Arabic content for the Middle East market.

The first game from the new studio will be an Arabic language MMO based on the popular character "Majid." According to the announcement, "students and graduates will be the first to score a chance to engage their creativity and skills" through employment at the studio. You can read the full press release regarding the partnership after the jump.

Gazillion Entertainment today announced that they will be putting former President of Blizzard North, David Brevik, in charge of development as Studio Director for the upcoming MMO cross platform title, Marvel Universe. Brevik is an industry veteran who's worked on such titles as Diablo, Diablo II, Warcraft III and Hellgate London.

David will be participating in a panel at San Diego Comic Con on Thursday entitled: The State of MMOs. So stay tuned for more news about Marvel Universe later this week.

The full press release is available after the jump.

Just when you thought it was going to be hard enough picking between DC Universe Online, Champions Online and City of Heroes to get your comic book fix, Gazillion, a new MMO developer and publisher that was operating under stealth mode as NR2B Research, has announced its partnership with Marvel Entertainment to bring games full of the company's beloved costumed heroes to life.

As Gamasutra reported, Microsoft's Marvel MMO was canceled early last year, but it appears that hasn't stopped Gazillion from moving forward with multiple games based in that universe. Gazillion's first Marvel MMO will be Super Hero Squad, a casual game targeted at younger audiences. The second game will be Marvel Universe, which Gazillion is tight-lipped about for now. The announcement did mention it will be released on both PC and consoles and more information will be released in the coming months.

Gazillion owns four individually operated studios, including NetDevil, the developer of Jumpgate Evolution and LEGO Universe, and Slipgate Ironworks, which is developing its own MMO property. NetDevil's Scott "Scorch" Brown said Gazillion is helping behind the scenes with game operations, which frees up NetDevil to spend more time on development of its games. You can read the full Gazillion announcement after the jump.