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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."
So it's okay to chat with people while you are playing a game, but not otherwise?
GPL Deconstructed
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.
No sig for you!!
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
sorry to make advertisement for my own project .. .. "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 in the case of GOIM .. it can also transmit when you join games / when buddies join games ...
.. but the IM itself works on all platforms supported by eclipse/SWT)
but take a look at http://goim.us/
and i'm working on a xfire gateway which will enable every jabber user to add their xfire buddies to the jabber roster
(the sniffing part of GOIM still does not work for linux (as i had no time to port it yet)
Find me at http://herbert.poul.at
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).