XFire, Xbox Live, 1 Million EU DS Handhelds

There have been a number of statistic-related announcements in the gaming industry of late. The beginning of the year sees companies trying to start off on the right foot through upbeat marketing. So, with that in mind comes the news that XFire now has 3 Million subscribers, the 1 Millionth DS handheld has sold in Europe, and Microsoft has listed the top 10 Xbox Live Arcade titles. From the Xbox Live article: "Although no exact figures for sales were revealed, the publishing giant has detailed its most popular games on the Arcade service, with Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved leading the pack. The game is an adapted version of the retro styled arcade game that first appeared on the original Xbox, as part of Project Gotham Racing 2. Since the launch of the service in November, Geometry Wars has achieved some 200,000 trial downloads and 45,000 paid downloads, proving exceptionally popular with the online community."

Comments

Europe...

[Xerxus]

I just want to correct the summary... 1 million sold in UK, not Europe.

Europe is bigger than the UK!

Re:Europe...

[DiarmuidBourke]

Shows how well the editors read the links before posting the story. Well done Zonk.

NOT EU, UK (EU=3.5 millions)

[Sri Lumpa]

So EU=UK now?

It's 1 million DS sold in the UK, not in the EU.

I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[DrunkenTerror]

I avoided all IM programs like the plague since their inception. If I wanted/needed to chat with someone in realtime, I knew how to reach them, or they knew how to reach me, either through various MUSHes or IRC. In the early days I couldn't abide the thought of running some AOL or MSN (I didn't like ICQ's flower icon, either) software just to chat to people...

After a while, more and more of my gamer friends mentioned this Xfire thing. They told me about how it would show what servers your friends were playing on in different games, and how you could join that specific server with just one or two clicks, instead of reading IP addresses over Teamspeak over and over till everyone finally heard it correctly. I eventually broke down and got the xfire client, and it really has been a pleasure to use. It performs generally as advertised.

The coolest thing IMO is the in-game IM function. A lot of full-screen games can be real nazis about how you can alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del to get to you IRC or MUSH client... Xfire magically works in-game (in most games anyway) just by hitting Scroll Lock + X, which pops up a little window overtop of your game display where you can conduct conversations with your online friends, then just hit ESC a couple times and you're back to the game action. Xfire's ok.

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[2nd Post!]

So it's okay to chat with people while you are playing a game, but not otherwise?

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[DrunkenTerror]

It's just that anyone I needed or wanted to chat with, I could already reach through IRC or a MUSH. Everyone else I was able to blow off. I mean, I love my cousin and all but I don't want to her AIMing me all the time "WUT R U DOING??? I JUST FED THE DOG LOL!!!" When I was playing a lot of online games, Xfire seemed to be the lessest of all evils. It's just cool to be able to see all your gaming friends that are online, what games they're playing, and what servers they're playing on right there in one app. And it's easy to hit 'em all up and say, "Hey, the gang's all here, let's do that planned expedition in Game X." Even the dude camped out in Counterstrike can get the IM and respond, or ignore it until the map's over and then come join the rest of the crowd.

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Xfire would be nice if it was open, or at least had a better client. Their client is a huge resource hog which is a no-no for something thats supposed to run while gaming. It also lacks voicechat, which would be the true killer app(and kill ventrilo, hopefully).

Something that could easily group voicechat into games, and even into teams inside the game (since its packetsniffing anyways) would really be useful, no more sitting on vent in the middle of a scrim and having people ask "so what are you doing?"

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[hpoul]

sorry to make advertisement for my own project ..
but take a look at http://goim.us/ .. "Gamers Own Instant Messenger" .. altough still not 100% bugfree it is still useful and most important .. it uses the jabber protocol which means you have all features of an open IM, and an open protocol ... you can use all jabber gateways to chat to AIM,ICQ,MSN,whatever users..
and i'm working on a xfire gateway which will enable every jabber user to add their xfire buddies to the jabber roster .. and in the case of GOIM .. it can also transmit when you join games / when buddies join games ...

(the sniffing part of GOIM still does not work for linux (as i had no time to port it yet) .. but the IM itself works on all platforms supported by eclipse/SWT)

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[AlexMax2742]

I've had a less than satisfactory experience with Xfire. It doesn't detect a good number of games I play, even if they're supported. I remember Ultima Online and many Half Life mods having problems, along with many lesser well known games not being supported at all. Eventually, I quit using it, because all I really used it for was statistics tracking on my games, and since it didn't work on many of the games I play, why bother?

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[karl1828]

Ummm ... when did you last use xfire?

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.

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Whenever they first started trying to crosspromote with e-sports sites. Actually according to the files still on my disk..
c:\xfire_beta_installer_8509.exe - Jan 25 2003

I suppose I'll give the new one a try, but judging by the screenshots it still looks like your standard "i'm too cool to actually fit into the rest of your desktop" app.

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

[DrunkenTerror]

Although I agree with your assessment of the default skin, called "Xfire", it does have an un-blinged skin, called "standard", that just looks like a normal w2k-XP window.

1 Million DSs in UK, *3.5* in Europe

[LoveMe2Times]

The summary is messed up. The linked article states that 1 million DSs have been sold in the UK, vs 3.5 million in all of Europe (and 13 million worldwide). And apparently the PSP is much more popular in the UK than the rest of the world, resulting in more-or-less even sales with the DS. If I recall, the DS was outselling the PSP 3 or 4 to 1 in Japan until stores ran out of stock.

FarCry and Xfire.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Xfire the software that's installed with Farcry?

BTW Kick-ass game. A B---h to Install.* (does anyone know if you can use a gamepad with this game?)

---
*How to:

Make Images of all five CD's then mount and install from them.
Slow the speed down to 8x, and turn on "correct errors".

Math?

[MyLongNickName]

How is this listed in the Math category? The "1 million"? There aren't too many math news items, and was disappointed to find out this was just about a silly game console. Not that there is anything wrong with game playing, but prime numbers are much more interesting...

Re:Math?

[damsa]

I guess it's because of the first line of the post. Statistics show.....If you are stat geek you can do some regression analysis and extrapolate the success of the Revolution by looking at DS numbers in the Eu and also number of downloads of a single shareware game.

Re:Math?

[Bulln-Bulln]

> How is this listed in the Math category?

Maybe it's because Zonk needs help in math?
--> 1000000 (DS in UK) + 2500000 (DS in rest of EU) = 1000000 (DS in whole EU)
or:
--> 1 = 25 (1 country [UK] = whole EU [25 countries])

PS: It's likely that in this case "Europe" means way more than just the EU, but in terms of economics it's not always clear if Swizerland, Norway, etc are included.

Attention DS owners...

[British]

If you have mario kart DS, please sign on. I wanna play someone. Each time i try to connect via worldwide, I don't find anyone. I only raced one person once. Twas fun, but was never able to do it again.

Re:Attention DS owners...

[damsa]

Sometimes if my ping is high, or bandwidth is saturated when running bittorrent, I have a hard time finding someone online. Also my friend bought the nintendo adapter and says he finds games quicker with it. Also you might want to try playing when the Japanese play, around 4 oclock pm their time. YMMV

Re:Attention DS owners...

[Anonymous Coward]

ping is going to be even higher going over an ocean...
so, japan is probably even worse.
but, the rest is pretty true, nintendo-wifi is very latency sensitive.
get a good low-latency router, and make sure your ping is low.

Re:Attention DS owners...

[nickyj]

At www.witendofi.com there is always someone playing :)
Including me

Re:Attention DS owners...

[DMoylan]

i have the game and am trying to get connected. i've found no wifi hotspots accessible in dublin and my home wifi adapter a Netopia 3347NWG has prevented me from going online with the nintendo. just have to keep trying. its such a good game though it'll be worth it.

XFire

[aztektum]

XFire is cool and I have an account, as do many of my friends, but none of us have logged in to them for nearly a year. Like so many announcements of this nature, how many of those 3 million sign ups are actively using the service? Particularly in this case since it isn't costing a service fee.

Re:XFire

[Lord_Dweomer]

No kidding. I tend to ignore these stories because X number of subscribers DOES NOT EQUAL active subscribers, as we found out with AOL years ago.

Of course no company in their right mind would release the ACTIVE subscriber numbers first...because it would give them a disadvantage.

Re:XFire

[wyndairn]

Actually, Xfire has the number of actively logged in subscribers right on their homepage.

While total subscribers != active subscribers, Xfire's mostly an advertising based company. Any clients of theirs are going to pay for whatever gets viewed or accessed, so it's really Xfire's problem to worry about whether or not they're active. The 3 millon number represents an overall POTENTIAL reach - Xfire has come contact info for those folks, so they could potentially be reached out to to try the program again or become active. It's still an interesting number, that there are 3 million gamers in the world (not n insignificant number) were willing to give it a try.

Incidentially, I think Skype's concurrent/total subcriber ratio is about 4% (just from my informal polling), where Xfire's is about 5%-6%....not bad.

OS X

[SpartanVII]

Last time I checked, OS X was not supported for XFire. If there is one thing I would love to see, it would be for this great app to support more OSes.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux support isn't the greatest either. Someone developed an xfire plugin for gaim, but that doesn't include much more than the IM-like functionality. It's the special game-related things (e.g., 1-click join) that sold xfire to me, and if I can't have those then why use it?

Screw "Geometry Wars"

[Anonymous Coward]

Do yourself a favor and get some of Kenta Cho's shooters. Not only beautiful, but also BSD licensed and ported to GNU/Linux and OS X (but I don't have the link handy).

Re:Screw "Geometry Wars"

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. All of those are positively fantastic. Parsec 47 is my favorite, with Gunroar in second.

Re:Screw "Geometry Wars"

[CaseM]

You've obviously not played Geometry Wars.

FarCry and Gamepads

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to stick this bit here for Google's benifit

A lot of people have been asking about gamepad support for Far Cry. Well those who have a Logitech can use the profiling software. Make certain you get the latest version.* I'm currently tweaking my profile to work the way I want it, but a gamepad will work.

*It has FPS support.

Xfire

[ShadowMarth]

Many of the big game developers are getting on the Xfire bandwagon. The last two PC games I installed, Civilization IV and Star Wars Battlefront II both asked if I wanted to install it in the installation. I already had it however.

Not too bad

[Onuma]

I've been dabbling with IM/Chat/VOIP programs for many years now, and I haven't found too many problems with Xfire. I do like the fact that I don't get alt-tabbed out of my games when a message pops up - having the old Rainbow Six series of games get closed out when you got an IM was pretty damn annoying. I've even used Xfire like a VOIP program to talk to my family back home (I am in the military and currently deployed). It's free, and I can't complain about that either :) Now if only it had an option like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo where you could host a Voice server and connect through it - I probably wouldn't use any other program for gaming voip.