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Already an investor in TT Games, Snowblind Studios and Midway Games assets, Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) Home Entertainment is buying further in to the video games market by acquiring a majority of London-based Rocksteady Studios, the developer that made the Batman: Arkham Asylum game starring WB’s superhero.

Group president Kevin Tsujihara tells FT the stake is 68.4 percent, though the price isn’t disclosed: “The biggest gap this fills is that it locks in development talent on one of our most valuable pieces of intellectual property for games: Batman.”

When you look at the booming popularity of online games – from World Of Warcraft to FarmVille – it’s hard not to say “let’s have a bit of that”.

That’s what CEO David Levin’s B2B publisher United Business Media (LSE: UBM) (UBM) is saying – it’s buying Game Advertising Online (GAO), a New Zealand-based indie ad agency that serves ads in to free-to-play, web-based massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a real-time personalized sports feed. Previously, he was SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and, before that, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA). He tweets at @tyahma

If you are a consumer-facing startup pitching to VCs, the conversation is very short if your monetization strategy leads with advertising. It may, in fact, actually be a longer conversation if you simply say you don’t know how you are going to make money (as that argument has worked just fine for some businesses).

But the monetization model of choice these days is neither of those two – it’s based on prestige or achievement. It boils down to creating a venue for users to move upward through some game or exercise and then be able to tout that progress to their social graph. One additional dimension is users being able to see how they stack up against the general public, a concept known as the leaderboard. The achievements can be chips amassed playing online poker, or the number of followers gained on Twitter, or the volume of clicks on a bit.ly link that are shared.

The rise of prestige as a new form of currency has ramifications for businesses facing decline like print or broadcast. (More below on what companies in those spaces can learn from this trend.)

Zynga, the current social gaming behemoth, is using some of its money to do acquisitions: it has bought Serious Business, creators of social games on Facebook.  SB, based in San Francisco, and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners ($4 million in funding), was founded in early 2008 by two former Powerset engineers. It launched one of the first ever games on Facebook, Friends For Sale.

David adds: Zynga recently said it planned to bring some of its titles—such as the popular FarmVille game—to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) properties, including MSN Games and, oddly enough, Windows Live Messenger. The move is seen as an expansion from social gaming to a more general online distribution strategy. But that doesn’t mean the company is looking to remake itself. As the acquisition of Serious Business suggests, Zynga is not about to give up its strong presence in the social net space.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) seems intent on making a big entry into the social games space. The company announced a week ago that it would bring titles from social game giant Zynga to its online properties, including MSN and Windows Live Messenger, and now Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is in talks to buy CrowdStar, the social game company behind the Facebook hit Happy Aquarium. CrowdStar hasn’t gotten the attention of Zynga or Playfish but it’s the fourth biggest developer on the social network, according to AppData. And Happy Aquarium, which launched only last fall, is the sixth most popular game.