World of Warcraft is obviously popular, but a new infographic (See Below) reveals that it goes further than that – Azeroth’s population surpasses that of most countries.

Despite its slow decline in active subscribers, World of Warcraft is a pretty darn healthy MMO. Blizzard released an infographic today to celebrate the crossing of a threshold: since its release ten years ago, a whopping 100 million accounts have been created. That includes trial accounts, mind, but there’s no denying it’s an impressive census. In fact, it’s more than twice the entire population of South Korea, as the infographic happily points out.

All in all, Azeroth has a population of about 500 million player characters (an average of five per account, by our math), hailing from 244 countries and territories around the world. 52% of those characters are members of the Alliance, while 47% joined the Horde. Since Pandaren characters start out neutral, there’s also 1% of characters who are still on the fence.

It just goes to show that the glorious Alliance wins because of superior numbers. WOOHOO 😀

World of Warcraft’s economy is still booming as well. Every day sees about 2.8 million trades through the Auction House, which was twice the activity of eBay on Cyber Monday a few years ago. All that trade is handled by just 71 auctioneer NPCs in the game world, who each probably deserve a serious raise.

You can see the full infographic in all its glory over at Battle.net. There’s a lot of big numbers, and they’re well-earned; WoW has been more or less the reigning champion of MMOs for a full decade now. Azeroth still has over 7 million active players as of the last report, and something tells me that its community won’t be leaving it anytime soon.

Rumours by several sources suggest Apple may currently be working on a whole new set-top box as a successor to current Apple TV boxes, with updated hardware and software to support many more types of content and improve the slickness of the whole experience. But a separate report out today from iLounge says that Apple also plans to cater for the growing number of app developers and iOS users using the boxes as pseudo-game consoles, with plans to introduce native gaming support to the Apple TV, along with direct support for game controllers.

With Apple’s AirPlay technology allowing not just video and music, but also direct streaming of anything that happens on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch onto a TV Screen via an Apple TV box, many users have started taking advantage of the feature to show their small-screen games on TV while they play them on their iDevice. And with Apple allowing iOS app developers to build experiences that employ the Apple TV in specific ways; and iOS games taking advantage of this more and more to provide multi-screen gaming experiences (not unlike the Wii U combining TV and Gamepad), Apple TV is quickly turning into a games console in its own right – but there’s a problem. Streaming games from screen to screen adds a noticeable lag – around a tenth of a second – between the two devices, which for high-action gaming like shooters; or games that require fast reactions like racers, can completely kill the game play. Also, even for games with direct Apple TV support, using controllers other than the iDevice running the game requires those controllers to be paired with the device, not the Apple TV itself, introducing further lag.

Now though, it’s been suggested that Apple are looking into furthering the ability of Apple TV to play games, with sources such as iLounge claiming that planned software updates will introduce the ability to install games directly on the Apple TV box itself, as well as direct support for game controllers. 9to5Mac, who have a high level of accuracy regarding Apple rumours, claim knowledge that Apple may be planning to directly implement the Apple iStore into a future Apple TV refresh, lending some suggestion as to how the former may be achieved – but stop short of suggesting the updates are anything to do with gaming, instead suggesting the new hardware will be a refresh with a focus on improving the speed and user experience.

Apple have declined to comment on any of these rumours.

The current Apple TV last received a significant update in March, 2012, so it’s due for a refresh. Though no date for the supposed new Apple TV has yet been suggested – either by Apple or by rumourmongers – the suggestion from the latter is to expect a launch in Spring or Summer 2014. With Apple generally preferring Autumn for major announcements on the iPhone/iPad side of things these days, that timing would make a lot of sense as a way to keep up interest in Apple throughout the year.

Monolith the Developers of the latest installment to the Lord of the Rings Saga … (oops I’m not allowed to say that any more) Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor have come under fire of late after airing there Alpha build that allowed them to show off their procedural enemy system.
Why have they come under fire you ask? Well take a look at the video:

As you can see the stealth mechanic and some of the assets look very similar to Ubisoft’s Assassins creed series. This provoked at twitter rampage from ex Ubisoft developer Charles Randall saying:

Now no one knows for sure if these allegations are true or if Monolith just took allot of inspiration from Assassins Creed but to be honest there are some assets that stick out like a sore thumb.

The Assassins Creed 2 Tightrope for example:

Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor

Assassins Creed 2

But is this just money for old rope at this point (see … see what I did there) in your opinion do you believe that there are too many copycat games out there nowadays or do you think it’s fine for games to copy elements providing the overall experience is different enough to warrant it being a separate game?

Personally I think that the Nemesis system and Wraith mode really set Mordor apart in enough of a way that the familiar aspects of Assassins Creed only enforce my positive feelings towards the game.

Now Charles Randall did later turn round to say:

This does show that anyone is going to be annoyed if they believe there work has been plagiarised, But that he didn’t mean any ill will towards Monolith.

But the questions still stands is reusing assets and code from an existing game in order to make up the backbone of a new game really classed as stealing? Personally I believe that using existing code to help get a game up and running is almost a necessity in this day and age with the number of bugs and issues that coding from scratch can cause. And ok it is someone else’s work but the last time you bought a kettle for you kitchen or a sandwich for your lunch, did you complain because it was basically the same as any other? Constructively reusing ideas and assets is the only way to push anything forward in the world today, not just in gaming.

And in a final piece of irony Randall also tweeted this:

Funny how he has become the story rather than the Assets implementation itself.

King is a big name in the area of casual, mass-appeal gaming. They seem to specialise in match-3 games like the popular Candy Crush Saga… which makes it all the more confusing when you hear that they filed a ‘Notice of Opposition’ for the use of ‘Saga’ in the game… Banner Saga?

The notice basically says that because King make use of the word ‘Saga’ that Banner Saga is not allowed to use it themselves for their game as players might ‘confuse’ the two games. As mentioned above, Candy Crush Saga is a match-3 game in the vein of similar games such as Bejeweled (although Bejeweled is more of a match-4 last time I checked…), you swap the ‘candies’ get a match, they vanish and more drop down to fill the board. Banner Saga on the other hand is a game inspired by Nordic tales and has a rich RPG-style to the play. So either someone at King has never played or heard anything about Banner Saga or else someone in their legal department has gone mad.

When contacted with questions about the notice King said that they had applied for a video game patent on the word ‘saga’ and claimed not to be targeting Banner Saga because it bore any resemblance to their own game, but purely because they needed to be seen to be defending their copyright against the ‘real copycats’. In other words, this ridiculousness is purely because they wish to make an example of Banner Saga to warn off competition. Somehow, I think this action is not going to be taken seriously by the copycats who must be laughing themselves silly.

On the other side of the dispute, Banner Saga developer Stoic has said that the patent notice is putting the idea of a sequel to Banner Quest in jeopardy.

“We won’t make a Viking saga without the word Saga, and we don’t appreciate anyone telling us we can’t.” the studio said, noting that while King’s position on the issue remains unchanged the future of their planned sequel remains uncertain.

Earlier in the week Stoic’s Alex Thomas told Polygon “King.com claims they’re not attempting to prevent us from using The Banner Saga, and yet their legal opposition to our trademark filing remains.” and that the studio is ‘humbled’ to have received support and have others standing with them for the right to tell their own ‘saga’.

Sometimes you really can’t make this stuff up.

(Due to the size of the screenshots, thumbnails have been used below. To see an image in full size, just click it)

It’s been a couple of months now since the crowd-funded game by Megaman creator Keiji Inafune smashed all records – and more then secured the release of spiritual successor, Mighty No. 9, on all current gen consoles and PC – and newly leaked screenshots have let us take a glance at the current status of the game’s development.

Keiji Inafune’s Comcept dev studio gave a peek at the Mighty No. 9 alpha build in images that only backers of its crowdfunding campaign can see – but you can never keep secrets from fans for very long; and those same images soon got out to the wider public. While clearly a lot of the screenshot contents are placeholder elements, they DO give a good look at the current character model design for No.9, and reveal a graphical style to the game that’s not unlike the Classic Stages of Sonic Generations.

Some have commented that the placeholder walls and other elements in the screenshots look similar to Unreal’s default elements, perhaps suggesting the game will be running a version of the Unreal Engine. Nothing’s been stated in this regard, but it WOULD be cool if so. We’ll have more news when it arrives!