Xfire

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

~ the obituary ~

xfire was the kind of thing serious western pc gamers ran in the background to track which game their friends were playing in real time, like a pre-steam friends list with auto-launch. in turkey counter-strike was an internet cafe game for me more than it was a home-pc-with-a-stable-broadband-connection game, and the people i played cs with were the boys at the next seat, not friends i was tracking from across an ocean. i knew xfire existed. i never installed it.

xfire shipped in april 2004 as a free game-aware instant messenger built by dennis 'thresh' fong, the legendary pro quake player from the late 1990s, alongside cofounder mike cassidy and others at ultimate arena inc. the trick of xfire was that it watched what game your pc was running and reported it to your friends list. when you launched counter-strike or battlefield, your contacts saw it on their xfire window. they clicked your name and their copy of the same game launched with the right server address pre-filled. that was a small piece of magic in an era before steam friends did the same thing.

viacom bought xfire in april 2006 for $102 million as part of mtv networks' attempt to build a games portal. the fit was always strange. mtv did not really know how to operate a network-software product whose core value was fast iteration on a desktop client. by late 2009 the team that had built xfire was unhappy and the user numbers were sliding. viacom sold xfire to a small startup called titan gaming in august 2010 for an undisclosed sum, and most of the original engineers left. xfire raised $4 million more in october 2011 to push a website-and-streaming pivot that did not catch.

the actual cause of death was steam. valve had launched the steam friends list in 2007 and the steam community in 2010. by 2012 steam was doing what xfire did, on a much bigger user base. there was no need for a separate client at all. the registered user count eventually peaked around 24 million in 2014 but by then most of those accounts were dormant. xfire shut its social services down on june 12, 2015. the messaging service followed two weeks later. the rest of the platform held on for a few months and then closed for good on april 30, 2016.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

xfire's appeal in the mid-2000s was specific to a particular type of user. you were a pc gamer with a home dsl line and a big game library, with a small group of friends spread across several cities. xfire kept that group glued together by showing you who was playing what right now. the auto-join feature was the killer trick. if your friend was on a counter-strike server you wanted to play on, you clicked once and were in the same lobby. discord and steam later did this with no fuss, but in 2005 xfire was the only thing that did it well.

~ the slide ~

xfire's downfall was structural rather than dramatic. valve was folding every social feature xfire had into steam's storefront and launcher, with no extra app required. once steam had achievements and party-launch built into the friends list, xfire's reason to exist mostly went. titan gaming's 2011 pivot toward streaming and esports tournaments was a sensible attempt to find new ground, but discord landed in 2015 with built-in voice chat and absorbed the same demographic faster.

~ the long tail ~

xfire is one of those services where the shutdown was not the moment its users felt the loss. by the time it actually closed in 2016, almost everyone who had used it in 2005 had been on steam for years. the loss of xfire was a slow drain throughout 2010-2014, not a single event. dennis fong went on to be a serial gaming-tech founder, with later companies plays.tv and gamersfirst. the auto-detect-and-join idea is now invisible plumbing inside every game launcher of the modern era, but the original product that made it feel like a small magic trick is gone.

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