Today, World of Warcraft; tomorrow, Guild Wars, Hellgate: London and Half-Life 2. That's what Blue Orb has in mind for the SwitchBlade software solution, which allows gamers to play WoW using an Xbox 360 controller. Blue Orb has also tweaked their SwitchBlade software with regards to WoW, so if you're interested in knowing what Blue Orb has planned for the future, the full article awaits, after the jump.

Less gamers are clocking in hours to spend time playing PC games online, according to Xfire's latest report. Numbers began to drop since August. Xfire senior director of marketing Frederic Descamps believes there's a very apparent reason behind this - many tried to finish the fight, while others continue to play Bungie Studios' Halo 3 on the Microsoft Xbox 360 instead of their PC gaming rigs.

More details at the full article!

Xfire's just finished tallying up their 8-million strong user base's daily play time for the month of September. And given that school started for the said month for territories across Europe and the US, we're looking at an overall decrease in playtime for the instant messaging service's top MMORPGs and FPS.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft suffered an 18 percent drop, with competing titles like ArenaNet's Guild Wars, Joymax Co.Ltd.'s  Silkroad Online experiencing 13 percent and 27 percent decreases in their population's overall play time respectively. Other major games like Wizet's Maple Story, AeonSoft's Flyff, CCP Games' Eve Online, and Turbine, Inc.'s  Lord of the Rings Online remained unchanged.

Similar trends were reported for Xfire's multiplayer FPS community. Top games like Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer lost 12 percent, and Valve Software's Counter-Strike Source lost 18 percent of their population's play time. Other frequently played FPS games for the month include Digital Illusions CE's Battlefield 2, Splash Damage's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and Counter-Strike 1.6.

 

One of the guys over at Xfire.com named Artaxs was at the recent BlizzCon 2007 and was able to play demo versions of the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King and StarCraft 2. More importantly, Artaxs had a chat with some of the community managers regarding the latest developments for the MMO expansion.

Before we get to that one though, let us first talk about the much-anticipated sequel to the real time strategy game that captured the hearts of PC gamers last decade. According to Artaxs, he was able to play as Terran in StarCraft 2. No one is talking about release dates yet, though. As always, Blizzard said that the game will be released when it's ready.

Regarding the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Artaxs learned that Northrend will not be entirely covered with ice as the developers didn't want to commit another "Kalimdor mistake" - miles and miles of desert that's quite boring, to really be honest about it. Furthermore, the opening zone is going to be a coastal area bordered by a Sequoia and Redwood forest to the north.

There's also a new profession known as inscribing. Flying mounts will be available to level 75 or 78 players. Artaxs said that Blizzard wants to keep players grounded for a while to be more familiar with the new locations.

An interview by 1UP with Community Manager Aaron Kaufman had revealed that Electronic Arts and the Command & Conquer online community were still waging a constant battle revolving around the three things: the 1 vs. 1 ladder system, the disconnect issues, and gameplay balances.

 

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is currently the most played RTS over the PC platform. Xfire's Xstatics placed C&C3 on top of the RTS gaming list, even while contested by more the strategic and unfortunately overlooked Supreme Commander from Gas Powered Games and THQ.

In fact, the game has become so popular that the World Cyber Games has listed this game as one of their flagship titles for the RTS competitive leg, along with Blizzard's Warcraft III: Frozen Throne and original Starcraft. This is where all the troubles began.

Because of the World Cyber Games U.S. Open invitational announcement and the apparent influence it has had on the American Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars online community, there has been a flurry of "did toos" and "did nots" over at the official forums that certain gamers listed on top of the 1 vs. 1 Ladder list are actually cheating.

Gamers who disconnect from a game in order to avert tagging a loss to their stats are now considered as cheaters. Kaufman, better known around the forums as Apoc, explained fixes going to be introduced with patch 1.05 will not only change the current lineup of top performers, but will also establish serious consequences for disconnectors.

But more often than not, gamers have complained that they wouldn't need to disconnect early from a game if the balance issues were addressed in the first place. Instead, they reasoned out that their disconnects are often morale-based, because of one-sided tank rushing power that instantly lop-sides any competition.

Apparently, balance changes will be introduced in the coming 1.05 patch, where Apoc believes that should completely stir up the top 100 players in the ladder rankings. Although it gives aspiring competitors little time to straighten out the rankings and weed out the real top RTS players in the list, Apoc believes the best ones can easily adapt to balance changes and still win in competitive matches.

 

In the three months that flew by, Xfire jumped from a mere 6.5 million registered user base to a whopping 7+ million, all over the world. Since the free online service, thanks to Xfire's in-game IM widget, caters to over 800 PC games (which includes MMOs) worldwide, it should be interesting to find out what Xfire's Xstatics numbers pull out for the month of April and May.

According to Mike Cassidy, CEO of Xfire, the current user base now provides 14,300 man-years on gameplay and activity within the community. And that's just for the month of March alone. There's a wealth of information that marketers and game developers could tap into, because instead of focusing on single region or market alone, Xfire actually monitors what gamers play everyday, wherever they are.

According to the official press release, Xfire is also currently hosting an invitational Counter-Strike: Source tournament for North America. The competition, called "The Ridiculously Long Lasting Stride Xfire Cup 2007," is sponsored by Stride Gum and offers US$ 24,000 in prizes for the participating North American teams.

PLAYXPERT announced in an official press release that their new line of in-game "widgets," uncannily named PLAYXPERT (oh the horror!), for the avid PC LAN and MMO gamer. These little management tools sit inside your game, offering a semi-transparent feature so that they don't obscure your field of view, but still allow you to view content streamed right through.

 

The universal instant messaging and chat system (with VoIP support) is compatible with Xfire, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ, and MSN engines for IMing or chatting. But the PLAYXPERT platform is especially helpful for World of Warcraft players, since the initial release will come with special features for the successful Blizzard MMORPG. Future support for other popular games will soon be supported through add-on releases to the platform.

Other widgets include the Armory widget, Thottbot Widget, WoWWiki widget, and a WoWhead widget. A Google widget will also be provided so that any game can find key information online without having to ALT-TAB out of the game and launch a browser. Utilizing an in-game overlay technology, the widgets actually are rendered through DirectX (with OpenGL support coming soon) and not through the Windows GUI.

Aimed specifically for the techie, geeky and even hardware enthusiast gamers, other future widgets will include real-time hardware diagnostics. Game stat tracking, clan and team management, in-game music access along with other additional community features are also slated to come soon.

And of course, budding coders can even add their own widgets to the platform without having to tackle the difficulties in coding overlay engines. PLAYXPERT has already published a full application programming interface (API) for the platform so widget coders can get started on their own custom additions to their gameplay experiences.

The worldwide, seven-million gamer community of Xfire and their Debate Club will be hosting a live debate session in their fourth Xfire Debate Club: The Two-Handed Sword on April 26. This time around, the heated discussion will be bringing a varied panel of guests ranging politicians to game industry journalists and critics to contest the matter of "Censorship in Video Games."

The session, to be moderated by Stanford University's Henry Lowood, will bring together Matteo Bittanti, a researcher at Stanford University; Hal Halpin, CEO of Entertainment Consumers Association; Dennis McCauley, CEO of GamePolitics.org; Russ Pitts, Editor of The Escapist; to discuss matters regarding:

• Governments' involvement and their regulation of video games
• Game exposure to children and their consequential influence on them
• The power of "the creative license"

Frederic Descamps, senior director of marketing at Xfire, commented, "As video games become a more mainstream form of entertainment, questions regarding censorship and legislation continue to gain significance." The debate will take place at April 26, 4 p.m. EDT or 1 p.m. PDT at Xfire's debate section. You can head there through the "Read" link below. And don't forget to bookmark it!

 

Xfire has got a whole lot of other interesting statistics for the month of March this year, and it looks like plenty will be head-turners for the PC gamers and avid MMO gamers alike. During Xstatic's official launch, it was made aware that the Xfire community, numbering some 6 million gamers around the world, would be statistically tracked for every game they play.

And for the month of March, it seems that the top 20 games played be Xfire community members are topped yet again by Blizzard Entertainment's cash machine World of Warcraft. Also noticeable in the top 20 games list is the appearance of Electronic Arts' recently released Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for the PC, which sits at one spot away from the Top 10.

Top on the MMO list is (tada?) World of Warcraft with NCSoft's Guild Wars tailing behind. Free-to-play MMO giants JoyMax Co.'s SilkRoad Online and Nexon's (and Wizet's) MapleStory pick up the lower two of three spots on the top five list. Scandalous Eve Online enjoys a comfortable seat at the fifth spot.

Top of the FPS list is Counter-Strike: Source, Valve Software's next-generation anti-terrorism shooter. Activision's Call of Duty 2 in multiplayer mode fills the second spot, and Electronic Arts' Battlefield 2 takes on third. Valve manages to slip another CS title with Counter-Strike 1.6 at the fourth spot, leaving id Software's Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to bar Battlefield 2142 from entering the top five.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne peaks off the top 10 strategy games, with Electronic Arts' Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars stealing second spot. Big news: contending RTS titan Supreme Commander is tailing behind C&C3 with a staggering 20,000 player gap, although February saw THQ and Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander securely at second.

In an interview over at Gamasutra, CEO and co-founder of Xfire, Mike Cassidy, voiced his opinions on the Windows Live service. Apart from that, he also talked about the growth of the PC-based instant messaging service and gaming server tracker that some PlayStation 3 games use, Xfire.

Cassidy notes that at this point they don't fully understand the features/pricing and usage scenarios of Microsoft's Live service for Windows. He notes that they believe that gamers will not want to pay for multiplayer functionality, especially since the said feature has been traditionally free on the PC.

When asked if he sees if the Games for Windows branding as a threat, especially since the games on the brand will inevitably be linked to the Live service, he notes that while they're careful to watch what the competition is doing, they're very much confident in the strength and loyalty of their user-base.

Cassidy notes that integration of the Xfire service with the Xbox 360 has been more difficult than with other console partners. When asked about previous comments that he made that implied that they were in talks with other console makers - Gamasutra speculates an Xfire service for the Nintendo Wii - Cassidy can only tease, saying: "stay tuned..."

While they did experience some problems with integrating Xfire for Vista, he notes that everything is pretty much working well at the moment. Difficulties encountered included the new desktop rendering system of Vista, and the User Access Controls.

Oh, and before we end this, here's a little something for all the Mac gamers out there who feel a little left out. Mike Cassidy says:

The Mac user-base is very passionate. Although only a few top games are released simultaneously for the Mac and PC, Mac gamers have regularly asked us to create a version of Xfire for them. We are committed to supporting as many gaming platforms as we can as long as they have a large enough user-base. However, prioritization of projects is an ongoing battle.

As interesting as Mike Cassidy's words are, our utopian dream is still a true cross-platform "PSWii60PC" messaging service. One, can dream right? For the complete interview, feel free to head to Gamasutra's post via our "read" link below.