More and more North American publishers are beginning to realize the benefits of free to play, micro transaction or ad supported business models in the North American market.

Venturebeat’s Dean Takahashi reported yesterday on Wicked Interactive, a Toronto, Canada based company that will shortly be launching new free to play titles in the North American market.  Wicked Interactive will publishing a number of popular, free, ad-supported games from South Korean online game publisher Yedang Online.  Wicked’s chief executive, Stanley Yu said that his company has private funding from angels and institutions, and has 15 staff members.  Prior to Wicked, Yu served as the head of TrekLogic, a Canadian information technology outsourcing firm.

Wicked plans on publishing three of Yedang’s top titles; “PristonTale”, “Priston Tale 2”, and “Ace Online”.  Priston Tale 2 already has 1.5 million registered users in Asia, and was developed over 4 years at a cost of $10 million.  While Yu acknowledges this growing competition in the free to play market, his hope is that Wicked will differentiate itself from others by delivering high quality free to play titles.

While Yedang’s most popular game “Audition,” a dance title with over 100 million registered users worldwide will not be in Wicked’s lineup, Yu said that the company is working on additional licensing agreements over the next few years.  To put Audition in perspective, one of the world’s most popular MMO titles, World of Warcraft, has just over 10 million subscribed users.

Wicked and company face a growing number of competitors, with Outspark’s growing catalogue of free to play titles, along with OGPlanet importing and modifying popular Korean titles for the US market.