Shoutbox

It's certainly possible to detect most of the games that Xfire detects, without Xfire, but it would be a lot of work. It's certainly possible (and would make it much easier) to use Xfire's game data INI file (it's even probably possible to directly use its DLL!), but unfortunately that brings lots of thorny legal/copyright issues into the mix . The Xfire devs have been really nice (I've gotten responses to e-mails I've sent in the past), but I doubt they'd agree to something like that. I'll probably look into it some more, but I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you.

I'm also working on a number of other freeware programs (one with a very large userbase), not to mention a full-time internship at Adobe, so even if they did give me permission it would take a while for a new version to be released.

Plus, I submitted this program to both MsgPlus's online plug-in database and Mess.be's online plug-in database over a month ago, and neither has added it yet (or even sent me an e-mail acknowledging my submission!). Certainly not encouraging .

Anyway, running Xfire in the background in addition to MSN Messenger isn't that big of deal . MSN Messenger is currently taking up 21mb of RAM, while Xfire is using less than 3mb! And, Xfire can even automatically download game demos (like the Battlefield 2 demo probably coming out on Friday) the minute they're released, directly from the Xfire servers .