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."

Europe...

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

Europe is bigger than the UK!

NOT EU, UK (EU=3.5 millions)

So EU=UK now?

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

I avoided all IM's till Xfire

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

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

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 L

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

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, hopef

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

sorry to make advertisement for my own project ..
but take a look at http://goim.us/ [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 o

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

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 [xfire.com], plus my own person

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

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 lik

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

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.

Re:I avoided all IM's till Xfire

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 suppo

1 Million DSs in UK, *3.5* in Europe

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.

Math?

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

Re:Math?

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 share

Re:Math?

> 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

Attention DS owners...

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...

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 Japa

Re:Attention DS owners...

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

Re:Attention DS owners...

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

XFire

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

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 woul

OS X

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.

Screw "Geometry Wars"

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

Re:Screw "Geometry Wars"

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

Not too bad

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 clos