Malaysia's Star Online has an article up about professional game players, a breed of gamer different from the ones you might encounter in professional gaming leagues. These guys take it upon themselves to earn cash by playing online games for other people.

Leon Jalleh, 27, turned from delinquency to online gaming as a way out. Now he makes a living by levelling up other people's characters for them in World of Warcraft, Blizzard's massive online game. Like him, there's a growing community of gamers who engage themselves in the games to make up for their own inability to finish schooling, or for other similar reasons.

While Jalleh might be doing something many gamers frown upon, he does have his scruples about it, opting to study the game and play all of it himself, taking his time while doing it. In fact, he says he's opposed to using programs like WoWGlider to get the levelling job done. "If a game is dominated by bots," he laments, "then who are the real players supposed to talk to and interact with?"

Of course, there's still a wrinkle in all this talk. While Jalleh does take a certain high road ethically speaking, the article fails to mention that even lending your account to another person is itself grounds for account deletion. As for whether or not he happens to be an antihero of sorts, we'll leave that up to you. The only thing we can say is, paying bills is the same wherever you go, even if you do happen to work a different sort of job from the norm.

Blizzard's back in the news front with some more Burning Crusade numbers. The company announced today that World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade expansion has sold through approximately 3.5 million copies within one month following its mid-January launch in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

This figure, which enshrines Burning Crusade as the new record-holder for PC-game sales within one month, includes nearly 1.6 million sold in Europe, and more than 1.9 million sold in regions that play on North American realms, including more than 100,000 copies in Australasia.

World of Warcraft's worldwide subscriber base is now more than 8.5 million strong, and it's still continuing to grow as new and returning players join existing players in the game.

"We're thrilled about the overwhelming response that we've received for The Burning Crusade," said Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment. "We have worked hard to build upon nearly every aspect of World of Warcraft with this expansion, and it’s gratifying to see that players and reviewers are enjoying the new content."

Software distributor Soft-World International, the largest in the Chinese market, has filed a lawsuit worth US$3.78 against popular games-maker Square-Enix. Demanding the return of a royalty payment, Soft-World alleges that Square-Enix failed to fulfill its obligation as stipulated in a 2004 contract regarding the distribution of one of the latter's MMORPGs in Taiwan, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

According to the contract, Square-Enix was supposed to supply the company with the relevant source code for the MMORPG. Having failed to do so, the distribution of the game became problematic, thereby incurring losses for Soft-World.

Soft-World International currently handles Chinese language versions of popular MMO's RF Online, WoW and Ragnarok Online amongst others. Square-Enix, on the other hand, is a  Japanese producer of video games and manga, and is best known for its console role-playing game franchises, including the Final Fantasy series and the Dragon Quest series.

Square-Enix is yet to issue a comment regarding the lawsuit as of press time.