Playfire

» see playfire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i was a pc gamer, but not the achievement-tracking kind. that is the gap between me and playfire. my gaming years ran on counter-strike in the internet cafe and ultima online private servers, worlds with no gamerscore and no profile counting my hours back at me. playfire was built for the player who wanted exactly that record, the trophy case, and i was never that player. so this one i knew about more than i lived in.

it started in london in december 2007, three founders, kieran o'neill among them, into a private beta the following march. the trick was that you did not have to log anything by hand. it hooked into xbox live and steam and read your achievements and playtime for you, and your profile filled itself in.

that automatic record was the whole appeal. by 2012 it had passed a million users tracking something like fifty thousand games between them, a real network of people comparing what they had cleared. green man gaming, a games retailer, bought it that july.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it became ~

the acquisition is where the story quietly turns. really though, green man gaming did not want a social network, it wanted a reason for people to buy games from it. so playfire slowly stopped being a place gamers hung out and became a rewards layer bolted onto a storefront. you bought a game, you earned playfire credit, you spent it on the next one. the profiles and the comparing faded into the background.

in november 2016 they announced the network was closing, and on may 30 2017 it happened. playfire.com stopped being playfire and started redirecting to the green man gaming shop. the rewards client hung on a few more years and was finally switched off on september 30 2022.

~ the long tail ~

what got buried here was not a game but a habit. in those days a bunch of services wanted to be the neutral scoreboard across every platform you played on, the place your whole gaming life added up. playfire and raptr both chased it. none of them survived as an independent thing. the record-keeping did not vanish, it just went back inside the walled gardens, steam and xbox and playstation each counting your hours in their own yard, with no shared room left to compare them in.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »