Xfire and the free-to-play market: an interview with Xfire president Mark Donovan

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PC gaming has changed

Above: EA's Battlefield Heroes is free, but makes its money on items like the outfits seen in the video above.

GR: Any thoughts on the rising number of announcements for big MMO titles that are adopting the F2P model post-launch?

Above: Though their MMORPG Rift costs a monthly fee, Trion's MMORTS End of Nations will be free-to-play.

GR: There are more and more options for keeping track of friends, game stats, sharing videos, and voice chat. What's Xfire's role in all this as we move toward a future with more F2P titles?

MD: Xfire has always and will remain a centralized, cross-publisher solution for keeping track of friends, chatting and sharing game media. Our role going forward is to maintain the highest quality user experience for players, but to also provide more services for F2P publishers to take advantage of all of the tools Xfire has already built to drive engagement, virality and trial of their games. They to success in F2P is distribution and long term engagement - Xfire helps both and we're building out more solutions to help drive these benefits even further for publishers.

Oct 18, 2011

Hollander Cooper
Hollander Cooper

Hollander Cooper was the Lead Features Editor of GamesRadar+ between 2011 and 2014. After that lengthy stint managing GR's editorial calendar he moved behind the curtain and into the video game industry itself, working as social media manager for EA and as a communications lead at Riot Games. Hollander is currently stationed at Apple as an organic social lead for the App Store and Apple Arcade.