There's been a lot of talk over the last year or so about subscription numbers on MMOs and what's needed to keep a game afloat. World of Warcraft leads the pack with somewhere over 11 million paying players each month, so clearly Blizzard has nothing to worry about financially. Games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online are thought to have up to 300,000 subscribers, and it was recently announced that Star Trek Online is getting by with 100,000. When you look at numbers like these to get some perspective, this week's news about Dungeon Fighter Online is quite astonishing; So far, 197 million people have registered to play Nexon's 2.5D side-scroller fighter game, which was launched in South Korea in 2005 but is in open beta in North America right now.

The large numbers are no doubt due to the game's huge success in Asia, where it not only holds a world record of two million concurrent players in China, but has Anime and Manga based on the characters. It will be interesting to see if the game's popularity catches on in the west as well, but with 197 million people interested in it, Dungeon Fighter Online is probably well worth a look.

Although it's sitting pretty with all those subscribers, things have been fairly quiet on the World of Warcraft front in the last few weeks. Many players have slain Arthas and are sitting around waiting for the next expansion, which feels a little bit closer this week following Blizzard's class previews for Cataclysm. Almost every class in the game is getting a massive overhaul in WoW's third major expansion, and the revelations are being greedily devoured by the fans as they are announced. At the time of writing, around half of the classes have been covered by Blizzard (you can see the full coverage of the news on our WoW channel), and it's stirring up the community as they begin to gear up for Cataclysm.

If the previews weren't enough to get the players riled up, there's news of Blizzard contacting people to make sure they have a Battle.net account in preparation for the beta test. My guess, based on previous expansion release times, is that we'll see Cataclysm sometime in September/October, which means the beta should be starting within the next few weeks. But more on that when it happens.

If you're into your eastern-themed MMOs, you'll be pleased to hear that the closed beta for Perfect World's Battle of the Immortals has been dated. If you'd like to get a chance to try that one out once it starts next week, you're in luck - we have a stack of beta keys to give a href="/News/218ih lfck -ewd/hav69/battle-of-the-immortals-beta-key-giveaway">news article to take part and to check out the latest trailer. If you like this game, you may also be interested in ChangYou's TLBB, which has also just entered open beta.

That's all I can squeeze in this week. Happy gaming people, until next time.

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