Those of you who are hardcore Halo 3 or GTA IV fans probably don't know too much about the social online game Club Penguin, but it seems that most of the kids in the world do and, even more: they just love it! As solid proof stands the fact that Disney is planning to hire a team to manage the operation of the game in Australia - the user database has doubled since late last year to 800,000 registered members.

Ten months ago, Disney acquired Club Penguin from owner New Horizon Interactive and, following the introduction of online games based on Disney's animated movies and characters, the traffic from all over the world has increased. As we've said, however, Australia was one of the best responders to this measure and analysts consider that the online game's popularity will keep growing - especially after Club Penguin is linked to Disney's gaming site.

"One of the reasons why we're very excited about the opportunity here is that there is already a pretty sizeable audience of people from Australia going to Club Penguin," said Duncan Orrell-Jones, head of the Walt Disney Internet Group for Asia Pacific. "If you look around the world, Australia ranks way up there in terms of our brand appeal - it's sort of neck and neck with the US."

Of course that, following the success of Club Penguin, Disney is planning to release even more similar products over the years - a second online virtual world is planned to hit the Internet next year (the Tinker Bell game we talked about a while ago) and a third title based on Pixar's Cars will be released in 2010.

"Gaming is a very important aspect of our audience's experience online and in Australia the game activity online is quite strong," Orrell-Jones said. "In short, what we have is an entertainment destination... and within that we'll be distributing the sort of deeper, richer experiences of virtual worlds."

And everything sounds nice - it's good to know that youngsters have a family-friendly, safe place to enjoy and don't risk to be attracted by the most violent video and computer games.