XFire Hits 8 Million Users, Releases Bevy of Stats

GamesIndustry.biz notes that the popular PC communication service XFire has reached the startling mass of 8 million users. XFire users don't pay a fee to use the service, of course, but with some 40% of those gamers coming from North America that represents about 3.2 million players here in the states. They also let fly with some interesting statistics, gathered from their teeming masses: "According to the details based on activity across the month of August, taken almost entirely from PC game-playing data, World of Warcraft logged over 440,000 hours of gameplay on average per day. This was followed by Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer and Counter-Strike: Source, on 173,355 and 158,714 average hours respectively. The second most popular MMO was Guild Wars, logging 59,199 average hours per day, while Eve Online was sixth most popular MMO, and Lord of the Rings Online came 8th."

Article fails

[shoptroll]

Sad.

The article fails to mention how easy it is to game the stats because about a year ago there was a deliberate multi-forum attempt to get Windows Solitaire to the top of the chart. It did manage to beat Counter-strike for #2 in the wee hours of one morning, but never did get anywhere near WoW.

Re:Linux client?

[pieaholicx]

As far as I'm aware there was a plugin that ran on GAIM (possibly Pidgin, not sure how much libraries changed between name changes), but it was fairly out of date. There's also the Java Applet based version run by Xfire Plus! [xfireplus.com], but last I heard that was also broken.

Re:World of Warcraft's voice integration

[Endo13]

If you play online PC games, you're the right demographic for XFire. Xfire is not about public chat rooms, it's about having an IM app that lets you chat with your gaming buddies, see what game they're playing, chat with them in-game without minimizing/tabbing/etc., and - depending on the game - hop into the same game with them. Of course now you can also create chat rooms (which can only be accessed by receiving an invite from someone already in the room), do VOIP chat, and even group VOIP chat by creating a chat room and using VOIP in it. In my gaming clan, I'm the youngest member at age 26. Our ages range all the way up to over 50. Adding people to your friends list is a 2-way agreement. Someone won't be able to add you to their friends list unless you allow them. And you can set it up so no one but your friends will ever be able to see you online or anything about you.

That covers the basics, but there's still more features available as well. I've been using Xfire for years now, and it's become a must-have app for me.