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.

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.

So a new type of gaming headgear has just come out.

The headset from foc.us is the first wearable transcranial Direct Current Stimulation or tDCS. This device sends a low electrical current to your brain, improving brain power. This is achieved by 4 electrodes located at the front of the headset while the headset rest on the back of your head.

This headset claims to overclock your brain, improving your cognitive performance. The headset can be controlled manually by using either a touch sensor or your iPhone. Later models will include control via Android phones. Currently, you can only change whether it’s on or off, the mode or the current level with the app. There is no way to change the duration of the current.

This cool device will be sold $249 for US customers and £179 for UK customers and the rest of the world. They will ship to Canada, US, UK, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and continental Europe. It comes in two colours black and red.

If you want to check this cool headset for yourself head over to http://www.foc.us/.

The news of Machinima and Microsoft’s shady promotion deal (covered in this previous article) has already caused some waves in the Youtube gaming review community. Seems that it’s also given other content creators troubled by this courage to come forward with other such deals: EA has just been outed as allegedly offering a similar deal.

A post supposedly showing a deal to promote EA’s games in a positive light for CPM bonuses has emerged on NeoGAF. The ‘assignment’ has a set of guidelines outlined which specify certain games to be covered which have to be played on certain platforms, that focus is not to be put upon ‘major bugs’ in most games (although minor bugs are allowed to be highlighted in Need for Speed Rivals) and attention should not be drawn to glitches in Battlefield 4. The list of games include titles such as the afore-mentioned Need for Speed Rivals, Battlefield 4, Madden 25 and FIFA 14.

The deal was apparently for $10 per CPM (that’s a bonus $10 per thousand views), with ‘view count’ caps varying between games with Battlefield 4’s being a massive 20 million views. With Microsoft only offering $3 per CPM and capping views of all Xbox One videos in the promotion at just under 1 million, it seems that EA’s deal is the much bigger… well, deal.

But just like the Machinima/Microsoft deal it seems that no creator who signs for the deal is allowed to make the details of the arrangement public. This is a breach of the FTC guidelines in America which state that if a content creator is being sponsored for making a video promoting a product or service, they must disclose this in public.

Machinima has since claimed that their NDA only applied to the detail of the promotion, not the existence of the deal itself and in a statement to IGN, EA says that the offer was only for their Ronku program; for which they compensated fans for their EA content-containing videos and that they encouraged all creators to comply with the FTC guidelines and tell their viewers if a video was ‘sponsored’.

The wait is finally over. Blizzard’s virtual card game, Hearthstone has officially entered Open Beta! … At least for those playing in the North America region.

The Hearthstone news section has been updated recently with a post confirming the Open Beta, with the journey of Hearthstone over the past year from announcement of the game at PAX East to today’s launch being set out briefly before Blizzard invite players in North America who didn’t manage to get into the Closed Beta to download the game and begin playing against their friends; assuring them that there won’t be any more wipes of the cards accumulated in accounts so they are free to begin building their collections.

The post then goes on to assure players in other regions that they are planning to bring the Open Beta to all over server regions within the next few days, but say that open beta registration might be closed at points if the servers get too overwhelmed by the influx of new players. They also remind everyone that Open Beta is still Beta and therefore they are still monitoring the game closely and things might still go wrong even after all this time.

I can’t guess how many new players are going to come into Blizzard’s popular free-to-play now that the gates have finally been opened, but I believe the decision to open them region by region is a smart move from the company to avoid too much server overload from new registrations and annoying down-times during those periods when hype is once again at a high for the game. At the very least, I know that an awful lot of people are going to be very excited today/tonight after reading this news.

Blog post is here.