Slashdot Mirror

Just to wrap up the Blizzard talk and defend my position: no, it's not a contradiction; the available statistics suggest that a lot of people bought the game, and then have failed to continue playing it. It sold very quickly at first, but now no one wants it. The hype sold it, but the game itself hasn't succeeded in holding onto that player base. Many of the patch changes nevertheless appear to correspond to the agenda put forth by Activision's new management in the aforementioned conspiracy theory, even if Activision doesn't actually have direct influence in Blizzard's management: continued nerfing despite promises not to do so, removing drops from destructible objects, and only slightly modifying the difficulty of Elite monsters all appear to imply that the company wants to force players to participate in the real money auction house in order to finish the game.

Even if you dismiss all of the above as circumstantial, and want to completely ignore the prospect that Blizzard is prioritizing profitability over not alienating their fan base, it's still very apparent that Diablo 3 doesn't have the same class flexibility as Diablo 2, and that a very vocal group of fans considers the game broken. I've heard that Blizzard's testers couldn't actually complete the game on the hardest difficulty, and that they knowingly shipped the game in that state. While a tiny number of people were able to complete Inferno difficulty, Blizzard still decided to patch it to be easier, which they rolled out just last Tuesday. To me, that sounds very much like bad planning (if not another attempt to force people to gear up in the auction house), and the sort of thing we should attribute to managerial failure.

At this point, with Microsoft, I really, truly believe that people are so conditioned to hate their products that they can't rightly succeed any more with their current brands. This is the fate of all greedy computer companies, I think.

I'm going to preface my reply by saying that I am a huge fan of Diablo 2. I didn't like Diablo 1 all that much (a classic to be sure, but a little too slow and clunky for me). I've put thousands of hours into Diablo 2 (a small portion of which is represented on my Xfire profile. I know the game inside and out. That said, while I was excited about Diablo 3, a lot of the stuff that has been happening has caused my interest to gradually wane.

Don't forget the in game auction house

Something I can understand. There are going to be items sold for D3 whether or not this exists. Any solution that *would* stop people from selling items will end up costing money as it would have to be either a very developed technology, involve a lot of people, or both. It's against the ToS of every nearly online game out there to sell items, accounts, etc. and yet you can readily buy them for all of those games.

This way, Blizz makes some money and everyone's generally happy. Hell, there are people who are talking about the potential of making a livable income off of said auction house. How possible or not this will be can only be discovered once it's actually out and has been subjected to the usual balancing, but it may be a likelyhood to put in 40 hours a week and make minimum wage or something close enough...

Moreover, occasionally people are hard up for cash and need to get rid of assets. In the digital age, a Level 80 WoW character with maxed out crafting and the best of the best epic gear is an asset in every sense of the word - yet we cannot legally sell them due to the ToS. If a similar case came up on D3, at least someone would be able to clear out a whole bunch of the items they've been saving for one reason or another and put some money in their pocket.

the lack of a real singleplayer game

Diablo 2 was fun single player, but I honestly always had more fun running it in groups. The lack of offline single player is, as far as I am concerned, the lack of a single player game though. I agree with you here.

and that like SC2 there will be no LAN play option.

This bugs me to no end, and for more reasons than you may think.

Starcraft 2 came out. I tried it on a weekend while hanging out with a friend at a LAN party weekend at his house. I loved it.

But I didn't buy it.

The lack of LAN play is a deal breaker for me. If it turns out that I really, really want Diablo 3, I may buy a legitimate version and run the superior pirate version in a sandbox so I can have LAN play. In the digital age, there are people who are just as skilled as the people working for companies like Blizzard working to give the fanbase what they want. If the players want LAN play, they'll have it - just like they have it with Starcraft 2, just like they have it with games like Minecraft that don't really have an official LAN play system (via Hamachi), and just like they absolutely will with Diablo 3. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

I remember them rationalizing taking away the offline play as not requiring people to start over if they began a character offline.

Of course. This is marketing 101. "We're not taking something away, it's actually a bonus feature!"

Personally, I'm glad that they didn't have anything better to do like making sure that the game is actually better than its predecessor so that they could tell players how to play. Personally, I'm glad I didn't waste my money on SC2, I'm guessing that I'll feel the same way about Diablo 3.

I fear that I may feel the same way about Diablo 3. I have basically zero interest in buying Starcraft 2 until the full three games are out in a battle chest, and even then I might just not buy it. There's nothing so awesome in Starcraft 2 that I would be willing to put up with the garbage that comes along with

Makes me wonder what effect that will have to Xfire, specially after Viacom acquiring it from MTV Networks http://www.xfire.com/cms/xf_acquisition/

Blog now appears to be deleted, but front page states

Titan Gaming acquires Xfire.

Titan will be taking on the Xfire name, with a focus towards ongoing innovation in the gaming space. The Xfire services will continue uninterrupted for its users. Xfire redefined how gamers communicate, Titan intends to build upon this tradition and utilize the Xfire platform to help gaming companies better engage their users. We look forward to continuing and expanding upon the Xfire service.

source

Xfire has been owned by MTV for a long time. http://www.xfire.com/cms/xf_acquisition/ I can't think of anyone else that I would consider worse.

Goodbye, Au Revoir, Da Svida, Auf Wiedersehen
2010-08-02 5:52 PM PDT
Xfire has been sold by MTV / Viacom to Titan Gaming, a startup. The vast majority of the remaining staff has been laid off.

There is no official press release at this time.

As a Web Developer who has been with this company full-time for 4+ years, I'm sad to have to pack up all of the posters from my office walls, though MTV has been trying to sell us for some time now.

I received about 800 messages in the minutes after the system broadcast went out. If I don't respond to your messages, please understand that it's nothing personal.

The Xfire service itself, as far as I know, will continue. A million people a day log into the Xfire client and FOUR million unique visitors use the website each week. No one in their right mind, in this author's humble opinion, would walk away from that kind of userbase by terminating the program.

Thank you all for your support!

I have always believed in Xfire, and our community of users has played a big part in that. Together, we made Gaming History.

source

Because that static page is what xfire is showing the public. Go to the forums instead: http://www.xfire.com/forums/182619/

xfire itself

Team Leaving

August 2, 2010--Xfire has been purchased by another company. Most of the team that has brought you Xfire for the last 6 years is leaving, including me. We've enjoyed our time and I personally am sad that I was only able to do 127 releases. Good bye and game on!

--- Chris

Kotaku

Kotaku has tried to reach Xfire for additional comment through a press inquiry email address. Any that comes will be updated here.

So in other words, 3D Realms seems more of a rumor than anything. Hey, let's just say EA bought it. Or Curse?

It probably would have been nice if I actually linked to my profile in that post. -_-

According to my Xfire Profile, I've spent twice as much time as this guy but playing way more than any one game.

Even so, I probably have anywhere from an additional 1,000-2,000 hours in Diablo II in the days before Xfire existed. There's very few games I could imagine playing for that long...

Would people pay for a custom Warcraft controller? What would it look like and how could it be better? I don't know, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better than a mouse & keyboard.

Yes. Yes they would. Sadly, it's not exacally what you're suggesting. However, maybe this is?

Like most of my online buddies who enjoy playing multiplayer games competitively, I was very disappointed when I purchased L4D and learned that only 2 of the 4 campaigns were playable in versus mode.

And while Campaign mode (humans vs. bots) was fun for the first week or so, the game quickly became stale and I shelved it. "Survival Pack" is a fitting name when you consider that L4D has been steadily slipping in use since it's initial boom at release:

http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_january/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_february/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_march/

So, thank you Valve... for giving us what we should have received at launch. When the Survival Pack is released, how about putting together a real DLC with more maps?

Like most of my online buddies who enjoy playing multiplayer games competitively, I was very disappointed when I purchased L4D and learned that only 2 of the 4 campaigns were playable in versus mode.

And while Campaign mode (humans vs. bots) was fun for the first week or so, the game quickly became stale and I shelved it. "Survival Pack" is a fitting name when you consider that L4D has been steadily slipping in use since it's initial boom at release:

http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_january/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_february/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_march/

So, thank you Valve... for giving us what we should have received at launch. When the Survival Pack is released, how about putting together a real DLC with more maps?

Like most of my online buddies who enjoy playing multiplayer games competitively, I was very disappointed when I purchased L4D and learned that only 2 of the 4 campaigns were playable in versus mode.

And while Campaign mode (humans vs. bots) was fun for the first week or so, the game quickly became stale and I shelved it. "Survival Pack" is a fitting name when you consider that L4D has been steadily slipping in use since it's initial boom at release:

http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_january/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_february/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_march/

So, thank you Valve... for giving us what we should have received at launch. When the Survival Pack is released, how about putting together a real DLC with more maps?

Yep. xfire game stats: http://www.xfire.com/cms/stats/ Top 10 isn't bad for a free game.

There's plenty of sites already dedicated to this, such as http://www.wegame.com/videos/ and http://www.xfire.com/video/.

And let's not forget Xfire. http://www.xfire.com/ " Xfire is a free gaming tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily. It doesn't matter which online game your friends are playing, which server browser they are using, or which gaming service they're playing on; Xfire is intelligent enough to recognize where your friends are at any time. "

The xfire IM client does essentially that. It's older than Steam Community and it works with a ton of games.

You figuring that out makes me think of Xfire, which tracks the amount of time played by people who have the Xfire client installed.

Some quick calculations using stats from the xfire site show that on today, a non-holiday sunday, approximately 44 man-years of time have been played only in the game World of Warcraft. Not to mention that leaves out all Mac WoW'ers (we do exist), and ever so rare wine linux WoW'ers. And even on top of that, all the people who did play on windows today but don't have the Xfire client installed.

Relatedly, Mark Morris from Introversion recently participated in a free-form Q&A chat over at Xfire, along with a couple of other Indie games people of varying noteriety. He's got some interesting comments about Introversion's rise in there.

You can read the transcript from the Q&A over at Xfire's site. This was part of a two-day event talking about the state of independant development, with the more structured debate (which, alas, Introversion was unable to attend) transcript available here. Jenova Chen (of fl0w fame), Amanda Fitch (Aveyond, etc.), and Josiah Pisciotta (Gish, etc.) were all notable participants; not to say the others weren't notable, too, of course. ;)

Definitely worth looking at if you're into the indie gaming scene at all.

Relatedly, Mark Morris from Introversion recently participated in a free-form Q&A chat over at Xfire, along with a couple of other Indie games people of varying noteriety. He's got some interesting comments about Introversion's rise in there.

You can read the transcript from the Q&A over at Xfire's site. This was part of a two-day event talking about the state of independant development, with the more structured debate (which, alas, Introversion was unable to attend) transcript available here. Jenova Chen (of fl0w fame), Amanda Fitch (Aveyond, etc.), and Josiah Pisciotta (Gish, etc.) were all notable participants; not to say the others weren't notable, too, of course. ;)

Definitely worth looking at if you're into the indie gaming scene at all.

Every time I see one of these lists, I can't help but take a moment to mention the project I'm working on in my spare time, PseudoQuest. It's a humorous casual RPG, written entirely by just me in PHP/MySQL/JavaScript/AJAX (well, as much as anything can be "written" in AJAX ;) ). Free to play, supported by players buying in-game clothing and other non-game-related stuff. Still in open Beta, so please excuse the mess.

Also, this article is well-timed, since Xfire is putting on a series of chats with a handful of people from the indie game community next week. On the 24th is a freestyle chat to ask the guests anything, and the 25th is a structured debate about the future of indie gaming. More details can be found on the Xfire website. Guests include Jay Barnson of Rampant Games, Jenova Chen of Fl0w fame, Josiah Pisciotta who helped create Gish, several other big names in the indie scene, as well as yours truly (clearly the odd man out... heh).

Take a look at the rankings on the bottom left:

http://www.xfire.com/

Which market would you rather sell to? Nevermind the fact that Xfire is more entrenched in the FPS community than any other game community so the WoW numbers there are probably disproportionately low.

If you look at the most popular games today you'll notice at least a couple of them are heavily dependent on user created content and are continuously improved.

Half Life(1+2) and Warcraft 3 are great examples of this.

Games like this sounds very suitable for the OSS kind of model. If an OSS team could create a game engine with a map editor as powerful and easy to use as the one that comes with Warcraft 3 I think they could make a very competitive game even if the graphics is way below par. Just look how Warcraft 3 is dominating CC 3 that is allot newer with massively better graphics.

Or if they could write an FPS with the level of graphics of Half Life 1 would be enough if it allowed the community to easily create mods that might compete with Counter-Strike and Team Fortress.

http://www.xfire.com/cms/stats/

The OSS community has the ability to create competitive games if they wanted too since truly great games aren't about resource intensive graphics but about great preferably moddable game play. It wouldn't surprise me if there are already games like that out there that I'll never hear off because of the difficulty of marketing a game without a marketing budget.

http://www.xfire.com/

Much better statistics and much more relevant to gamers.

You aren't kidding. What they don't realize is that what works for Madden and The Sims (releasing an expansion or 'booster' pack every 3 months) doesn't work for PC Multiplayer games like the Battlefield Series.

Battlefield 2 sold well, but they tried to capitalize on that by releasing BF2:Special Forces, and Armored Fury and Euro Forces in quick succession, and were rebuffed by the community.

They then didn't learn from their mistake by releasing Battlefield 2142 a scant year after BF2 came out, and it only surpassed BF2 in hours played the first week. Now, it barely registers on the top ten for Xfire, and doesn't hold a good spot on Gamespy's Server list either.

I can play WOW and see what my friends are playing now with Xfire. http://www.xfire.com/
And I don't have to pay M$ a dime for it.

That's funny because what you want is exactly what Xfire does: http://www.xfire.com/. It includes a IM client and voice chat. You can also join a server your friend's are playing on through the buddy list. It also includes a built in bittorrent client for downloading demos and patches. The only thing it doesn't offer is achievements so you won't be able to show off your e-penis. It's free through and offers a great system to keep in contact with your friends and meet new people with it's friends of friends feature.

What you're looking for exists. Its called XFire (http://www.xfire.com/). No reason to pay $$$ for something they can do on ad revenue.

For GDC, Xfire released a snapshot of stats from their gaming client from December 2006. Gaming on Windows PCs is on the upswing for the amount of time spent playing the games, even if retail sales seem to be in a slump.

Xfire Stats December 2006

One game, World of Warcraft, just counting Xfire users, accounts for 15,000 *days* of play time every day.

In unrelated news, there is still no cure for cancer.

Spring/Hibernate/ActiveMQ/Acegi/XFire/Kitchen Sink

Agreed. Most of the people that are posting about the massive benefit that Live gives them but would probably be just as happy running the free XFire. Live may do a bit more, but not $80 a year more. I'd rather buy more games.

Some friends and I had a lan party last week, we rented a church hall. There weren't many of us, but it was good fun. I'd also recommend Xfire, it allows your friends to see when you're online and just join the server. You can even chat to each other in game, but independently of the game, which can be very handy.

Xfire (being an MTVN property now) has a bunch of events set up for this, too:
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xf_gamersweek06/

Illegal Danish was first featured on Xfire's WoW Machinima Contest. The second WoW Machinima contest is just now wrapping up. Winners will be announced friday, but you can see all the finalists here. We'll be hosting a free event at Stanford University on Thursday evening with a panel of Machinima movie makers including Ezra from Rufus Cubed (who did the Machinima in South Park's WoW episode) and the guys from Myndflame (who did Illegal Danish) will be there as well!
/end shameless plug

http://www.xfire.com/profile/killjoe

I think that so far most of you are showing the general idea of what xfire does, but not some of it's main features. First of all, it saves all of the servers you visit with xfire-supported games, and lets you join them with a simple click. Xfire also allows you to download files (such as patches or gaming movies or demos, etc.) in a bittorrent-like file downloader, which works very efficiently. xfire also allows you to chat in-game, as many of you have said.
What you haven't said (or at least that I've seen) is that xfire gives you a user profile that logs all of the games that you play, and for how long you play them. For me (a gamer), this is a really really cool piece of software. I think it's awesome to watch my gaming trends; some, however, think it's sad to see all of the hours that they're wasting away. My profile is here, and my cool xfire-signature-image-thing (great for gaming forums is here.

In my opinion, xfire is a great piece of software, and one that I use pretty much all the time that I'm at my desktop. I'm glad they're getting business (well, getting bought...), but I sure hope Viacom doesn't change the product too much...

- dshaw

I think that so far most of you are showing the general idea of what xfire does, but not some of it's main features. First of all, it saves all of the servers you visit with xfire-supported games, and lets you join them with a simple click. Xfire also allows you to download files (such as patches or gaming movies or demos, etc.) in a bittorrent-like file downloader, which works very efficiently. xfire also allows you to chat in-game, as many of you have said.
What you haven't said (or at least that I've seen) is that xfire gives you a user profile that logs all of the games that you play, and for how long you play them. For me (a gamer), this is a really really cool piece of software. I think it's awesome to watch my gaming trends; some, however, think it's sad to see all of the hours that they're wasting away. My profile is here, and my cool xfire-signature-image-thing (great for gaming forums is here.

In my opinion, xfire is a great piece of software, and one that I use pretty much all the time that I'm at my desktop. I'm glad they're getting business (well, getting bought...), but I sure hope Viacom doesn't change the product too much...

- dshaw

According to my Xfire profile, I've been playing for 28 hours. Already, I'm finished with the thieves', assassins' and mages' guilds, and completed every random quest I could find inside of all the major settlements.

Next in line is the closing of the random Oblivion gates. They're annoyingly redundant, but luckily, nothing can stop the 'Fox. This should be finished soon, considering that I can close a gate in about five minutes if I try hard enough.

So in conclusion, while Oblivion may be large, it is by no means infinite.

I believe that Xfire accomplishes the tastk of an in-game messenger that can used not only during WoW, but virtually any other PC game under the sun.

It's had 1-to-1 voice chat since Aug 2005 (version 1.43) and group voice chat since Oct 2005 (version 1.47). This is from the "Xfire Old Release Notes" at http://media.xfire.com/xfire/readme2.html, plus my own personal experience. It was a little buggy at first, but it's rock-solid now.

I don't find the xfire client is a resource hog on any of my gaming machines either, btw.

I know it's not what you're looking for for an office-based setting, but if you're into gaming, you'll want to look at XFire. Does all kinds of spiffy things like allowing IM'ing from within games (without having to alt-tab), and then has a bunch of other random stuff like voice chat, one-click game joining to your friends, a sort of regulated p2p file system, and a screenshot upload system.

Really, though, the whole being able to chat inside a game without having to constantly alt-tab out makes it worthwhile in my book. The downside, I suppose, is that it's windows only.

XFire already quietly does this for any games it supports, though you'll find nothing on their web site about the service.

I use XFire, which does mostly the same thing. A little bit tougher to add people to the friends list, but other than that, it's pretty much identical.

Perhaps I'm excessively cynical, but I can't help but wonder if along with Flickr Yahoo is acquiring any patents that could be used to chase competing photo-sharing products out of the market... like Yahoo is doing to XFire already...