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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."
I just want to correct the summary... 1 million sold in UK, not Europe.
Europe is bigger than the UK!
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.
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!!
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).