The XNA Game Development Studio for Xbox 360 and PC

Awesome -

Microsoft has officially released the final version of the XNA Game Development Studio, which aims to make writing games easier than ever before. We’ll see if the days of the basement coder have come again.

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Long time no see

And that’s because things have been very hectic at Xfire. We’ve got a bunch of exciting stuff (as always it seems). In particular the clan system is really taking off – thousands of clans in place already, and we’ll just keep building more features onto that system to help make it easier to manage clans. To be fair, I have very little to do with the implementation of any of these features – it’s all the engineering team at this point. I’ll have some projects more relevant to my direct work coming out soon…

In other news – it’s an exciting time to be around the Bay Area. It seems like every other day is this or that major new acquisition. I missed the last round of frothy bubble-ness, tucked away on the East Coast (and not in NY), so it’s a nice feeling to know that a couple blocks away is the next startup that will have a shot at changing the world (or at least a $10 million round of VC funding). Of course, this time I’m neatly tucked away in a major media company during much of the hype. But you’d be surprised at how entrepreneurial Viacom is letting (and encouraging) us to be.

Another conference:  Widgets Live. This looks to sort of be the catch-all event for widgets, put on by Om Malik and Niall Kennedy. The power of what you can do with widgets amazes me everyday. I’m looking forward to seeing some demos, but I’m most looking forward to intelligent discussion around what the future of the “widget economy” will be, and whether there really will be such a thing.

The term widget is loosely applied to a variety of structures, but generally indicate a semi-standalone element that can display information. I run widgets on my desktop, as well as on my NetVibes homepage, Google customized homepage, etc. The disappointing thing so far is that these widgets are almost always exclusive to the platform you’re using them on. Sites like WidgetBox are working away at trying to assemble a collection of widgets that can easily be embedded in websites in general. That’s a start. I’d love to see a more common standard emerge around the modules that I use on live.com, netvibes.com, pageflakes.com, etc. A nice competitive advantage for all of these customizable homepage is the robustness of their library of widgets/modules/whatever, but you also end up with a lot of duplication of effort. Since the fundamental coding for many of these modules are very similar, I wonder if we’ll see some consolidation around a standard format sometime in the next year or so…

Anyway, if you’re heading by the conference, let me know!
::Kiskis::

Chat with Ctrl-Alt-Del

Tomorrow (Friday) we’re hosting another chat with Tim Buckley from the webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del and Ryan Sohmer from Blind Ferret Entertainment. This is the second time that Tim has been on Xfire for a chat with out community,and we’re pretty psyched. Tim and Pierre were a fantastic duo last time around, answering tons of questions for the community. I’m thinking this one will be even better. You can get all the details on the event page – it’s probably a bit late to snag a spot, but the transcript will definitely be up after the chat – check that out for all the inside info.

New Xfire Feature

If you’ve got an Xfire staff member on your friends list, check out their infoview….you’ll be able to catch a sneak (VERY alpha) look at a really cool upcoming Xfire feature….

What would you like to see?

I’ve been kicking around a couple different ideas of what cool Xfire stuff you might like to see on this blog. Stuff like the top 10 games on Xfire are generally accessible right from the homepage, as the newest files released are similarly easy to find. I could discuss new features as they come out (did that one already), or just answer questions. But it’s all up to you. I’ll start putting out info and see what works and what doesn’t, but if you want anything in the particular, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

::Kiskis::

Music Tracking & Xfire Plus

So apparently Google has added a music tracking option to Google talk. They’ve made the top tracks by genre publicly available, so you can check out which songs are actually popular and being listened to (as opposed to just what’s on the radio). While Google Talk is hardly a huge sample population, it still is a pretty sizable sample, though definitely skewed more toward the techy crown. I see this a lot like what Xfire does for games with our top 10 list on the homepage – you’re able to see what people are actually PLAYING, not just what sells at the retail counter. We go one better by giving you the number of minutes played, though we don’t do it by game genre.

So then I was thinking – there’s no real reason the Xfire Plus team couldn’t do something similar for Xfire. If you haven’t heard of Xfire Plus before, you really should swing by their site. They’ve got a bunch of cool plugins for Xfire, including a cross-IM service, a web version of Xfire, as well as a music plugin that will display your current music in your Xfire status. Theoretically they could have an opt-in option that would upload that music to a similar list on their site. Their news page says they’ve passed 7000 unique users of the plugin, so that’s pretty good in my book.

::Kiskis::

MTV Video Music Awards

This is the first year that MTV has added game music to the Video Music Awards (VMAs). As part of that, they’ve asked us and Gametrailers, our fellow MTV gaming site, to hold a vote in our respective communities. The results of that voting will help determine which of the finalists will eventually with the VMA. The vote runs until August 28th, and you’ll be able to see the final winners on MTV’s Overdrive on August 31st. (You can access Overdrive through MTV.com, under “Games”.)

There’s been some posts in the forum asking how the finalists were chosen, or why so-and-so’s favorite game wasn’t chosen, or that this or that game’s music is crap, etc etc. The short answer is – those are the finalists. You may not agree with why some game was left out, but those are the ones that the MTV gaming folks decided on. So maybe your favorite’s not there, but get out there and vote anyway! Here’s why.

The long answer is that this is the first time MTV has done this. So it’s entirely uncharted territory. So if they run this vote and we get 50 votes for the winner, chances are that next year they won’t be bothering to do the vote at all. On the other hand, if we rally together, get your friends to swing by and vote, and get up to tens of thousands of votes – then suddenly this community is a pretty serious force to be reckoned with. So that when MTV is looking for gaming advice in the future, they’ll know where to come – right to the source of the world gaming community, you all.

So get going, and let your voice be heard

::Kiskis::

Release

Been awhile since I posted, but it’s been quite busy here at Xfire. A couple things of note over the past 2 weeks:

• New Xfire release is out. One cool feature is the new LAN Server Browser.  Our friends over at 20ID were recently in town (winning the CAL championship, by the way – congrats!) and pointed out that Xfire could be very useful at these tournaments and LAN events by simply detecting what servers were available on a local network, rather than only looking at Xfire’s master server list. Now, when you hit your local LAN center, check if they have Xfire installed (most do). You can hit the Servers tab and see what servers people around you are on. Easier than ever.
• We also just launched our new Xfire Store. We’ve had tons of requests for Xfire shirts, hats, whatever – some way to show off the love of Xfire. Well, over the past few weeks we’ve been building up a cool new store with Func Industries. Right now we’ve only got a few products – couple t-shirts, a hat, and mousepads – but you can use Func’s nifty flash tool to completely customize your mousepad. They’ll print it out on their industrial printing machines and send it to you within a few weeks. These aren’t the crappy foam mousepads that you can print photos on at Walgreens – these are professional, high quality mousepads that the pro gamers are using to win. So go customize one! We’ll be adding more new shirts, sweatshirts, and cool stuff over time. Got a suggestion for a cool product or design? Contact me.

There’s a bunch of other new stuff, including new games, in this release, which you can find out about in the release notes. Enjoy!

::Kiskis::