The Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group will be spending a total of US$ 100 million to develop new multi-player games, virtual worlds, and other similar services that will be targeting children. According to Cyma Zarghami, president of MTV Network's Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group, the network sees the potential for a previously untapped market composed mostly of kids aged 8 to 14 gaming online.

Nickelodeon's online services are designed to cater to the different age groups. Services like myNOGGIN are designed primarily for pre-schoolers; Nicktropolis and the Nick Gaming Club are for young children; and The-NGames.com for girls. These services all promised to provide safe online gaming environments, child-friendly content, and most importantly, protection against predators. These online services will be developed and released over the course of the next 2 years as part of the Networks' plans to be leaders in the casual gaming sector.

Nickelodeon has also announced its expansion of its currently existing sites such as AddictingGames, Shockwave.com, and Neopets.com. The network explains that while these sites will place emphasis on developing new virtual worlds and online games for release, they are striving to keep things very child-friendly.

"Across all of MTVN's online sites, gaming is an important original genre and we are committed to delivering fresh content to our audiences in all of our demos," said Ms. Zarghami. With Nickelodeon's current online casual games logging in almost a billion game plays a month, it's not too hard to imagine its efforts paying off.