Xfire

This article is about the instant messaging service. For other uses, see Xfire (disambiguation).
Xfire
Original author(s) Garrett Blythe, Chris Kirmse and Mike Judge
Developer(s) Xfire, Inc.
Initial release 2003 (2003)
Last release 1.155 (March 20, 2013 (2013-03-20)) [±]
Development status Discontinued
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Type Instant messaging; File sharing; Screenshooting; Screencasting
License Proprietary
Website www.xfire.com

Xfire (pronounced "X-Fire"[1]) was a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers that also served as a game server browser with various other features. It was available for Microsoft Windows.

Xfire was originally developed by Ultimate Arena based in Menlo Park, California. As of January 3, 2014, it had over 24 million registered users.[2]

Xfire's Livestream (formerly known as Mogulus) allowed users to broadcast live video streams of their current game to an audience. The Xfire website also maintained a "Top Ten" games list, ranking games by the number of hours Xfire users spend playing each game every day. World of Warcraft has been the most played game for many years, but was since surpassed by League of Legends on June 20, 2011.

Xfire hosts events every month, which can include debates, game tournaments, machinima contests, and chat sessions with Xfire or game developers.

Xfire's web based social media was discontinued on June 12, 2015, and the messaging client was shut down on June 27, 2015.[3] The last of Xfire's services was shut down on April 30, 2016.[4]

History

Xfire, Inc. was founded in 2002 by Dennis "Thresh" Fong, Mike Cassidy, Max Woon, and David Lawee.[5] The company was formerly known as Ultimate Arena, but changed its name to Xfire when its desktop client Xfire became more popular and successful than its gaming website.[6] The first version of the Xfire desktop client was code-named Scoville,[7] which was first developed in 2003 by Garrett Blythe, Chris Kirmse, Mike Judge, and others.

On April 25, 2006, Xfire was acquired by Viacom in a US $102 million deal.[8][9]

In September 2006, Sony was misinterpreted to have announced that Xfire would be used for the PlayStation 3.[10] The confusion came when one PlayStation 3 game, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, was to use some of Xfire's features with more game support planned for the future.[11]

On May 7, 2007, Xfire announced that they had reached 7 million registered users.[12] Shortly after, on June 13, 2007, co-founder and former CEO Mike Cassidy departed the company to work for venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.[13] Adam Boyden, Vice President of Business Development & Marketing, was assigned to take his place and manage the company for a temporary period.

On August 2, 2010, Xfire was acquired by Titan Gaming.[14] At 22:16 Greenwich Mean Time, the following message was broadcast to Xfire users:

Xfire was bought by new owners today. Most of the team that has built Xfire over the last six years is leaving. We enjoyed working for you for the last 127 releases and wish we could stay to create the next 127. Good bye, good luck, and game on.

- The Xfire Team[15]

A few minutes later, the Xfire website displayed a message stating it was temporarily taken offline. When it came back online several minutes later, a new message was shown:

Xfire has been purchased by another company. Most of the team that has brought you Xfire for the last 6 years is leaving, including me. We've enjoyed our time and I personally am sad that I was only able to do 127 releases. Good bye and game on!

- Chris[16]

On June 10, 2015, Xfire announced that its social services will be shut down on Friday, June 12. The home page for the social part of Xfire now links to an export page where users can download all their previously uploaded screenshots and videos.[17]

On June 10, 2015, an announcement was made known via the Xfire client with the following notification:

System Broadcast:

Dear Xfire users - It is with sadness that we must announce that the Xfire Social services will be shutdown on Friday (June 12th). Please visit social.xfire.com to download your video/screenshot data. We apologize for the short notice - Xfire Community Team

Wed Jun 10 10:00:10 2015

Also on June 10, 2015, on the Xfire websites http://social.xfire.com/, http://classic.xfire.com, and http://export.xfire.com/, the following message replaced all previous content:

XFIRE

In 2003, Xfire released the Xfire Client, the first product to bring the outside world into your games. Since its humble beginnings as a simple chat client it has steadily grown to enable users to take screenshots, videos, and live broadcasts and share them on the Xfire Social Website. Attracting over 24 million users into a healthy and vibrant community, it set the standard for the socialization of PC Games.

Twelve years bring a lot of change to an industry. This is especially true in the fast paced world of gaming and the dynamics of the industry have changed significantly in this time. Since Xfire was first released, we've seen 3 console generations, the advent of mobile gaming, the transition from packaged games to digital distribution, and the rise of Free To Play games.

We've also seen esports grow from small LAN Parties into a maturing industry. Esports has the potential to grow as large as its real world counterpart, and at Xfire, we want to be a part of that. For this reason, we have decided to sunset the Xfire Client and the social site so we can focus our efforts on The Xfire Tournament Platform. This hasn’t been an easy decision. We have a lot of loyal users and we know many of you will be disappointed by the loss of the client and community. But we feel that we are well positioned to make a significant impact in bringing the exhilaration of esports from the pros to the masses, and we can’t do that effectively while also maintaining the client and social website.

We’d like to thank our loyal fans and users who have stuck with us over the years and we hope that you’ll join us on the next chapter of Xfire either as a tournament organizer, a team owner, a participant, or a spectator.

We understand that a lot of our users are attached to the screenshots and videos that were uploaded to your profiles and we want to make sure you don’t lose them. If you'd like to recover them, you can do so using the form below.

Thanks again for using Xfire, and we look forward to see you in a tournament in the near future.

Enter your username to download your screenshots and videos

As of July 1, 2015, the message on the Xfire websites http://social.xfire.com/, http://classic.xfire.com, and http://export.xfire.com/, had changed to the following.

On July 1, 2015, Xfire has also subsequently stopped their support to download screenshots and videos as stated in the message on the websites between June 10, 2015, till July 1, 2015.

XFIRE

In 2003, Xfire released the Xfire Client, the first product to bring the outside world into your games. Since its humble beginnings as a simple chat client it has steadily grown to enable users to take screenshots, videos, and live broadcasts and share them on the Xfire Social Website. Attracting over 24 million users into a healthy and vibrant community, it set the standard for the socialization of PC Games.

Twelve years bring a lot of change to an industry. This is especially true in the fast paced world of gaming and the dynamics of the industry have changed significantly in this time. Since Xfire was first released, we’ve seen 3 console generations, the advent of mobile gaming, the transition from packaged games to digital distribution, and the rise of Free To Play games.

We’ve also seen esports grow from small LAN Parties into a maturing industry. Esports has the potential to grow as large as its real world counterpart, and at Xfire, we want to be a part of that. For this reason, we have decided to sunset the Xfire Client and the social site so we can focus our efforts on The Xfire Tournament Platform. This hasn’t been an easy decision. We have a lot of loyal users and we know many of you will be disappointed by the loss of the client and community. But we feel that we are well positioned to make a significant impact in bringing the exhilaration of esports from the pros to the masses, and we can’t do that effectively while also maintaining the client and social website.

We’d like to thank our loyal fans and users who have stuck with us over the years and we hope that you’ll join us on the next chapter of Xfire either as a tournament organizer, a team owner, a participant, or a spectator.

Thanks again for using Xfire, and we look forward to see you in a tournament in the near future.

On April 30, 2016, the homepage of Xfire's site http://www.xfire.com was replaced with the following text:

In 2003, Xfire released the Xfire Client, the first product to bring the outside world into your games. Since its humble beginnings as a simple chat client, Xfire has expanded to enable users to create and play in hundreds of thousands of tournaments across the globe. Attracting over 25 million users into a healthy and vibrant community, Xfire set the standard for the socialization and connection in PC / Console Games.

Thirteen years bring a lot of change to an industry. This is especially true in the fast paced world of gaming and the dynamics of the industry have changed significantly in this time. Since Xfire was first released, we’ve seen 3 console generations, the advent of mobile gaming, the transition from packaged games to digital distribution, and the rise of Free To Play games.

But all good things must come to an end. XFire has had a great run and we can’t thank you enough for supporting us over the last 14 years. Today, with a heavy heart we turn off the lights at XFire and move on to new opportunities. See ya space cowboy...

Your friends at XFire

Lawsuits

Yahoo! filed a lawsuit against Xfire, Inc. on January 28, 2005, claiming that Xfire has infringed Yahoo!'s U.S. patent No. 6,699,125 for a "Game server for use in connection with a messenger server". Xfire, Inc. filed a countersuit against Yahoo! on March 10, 2005, which was eventually disqualified by the judge. There has been a settlement between the companies as of January 31, 2006. More details were posted to Xfire's forums, though terms were not disclosed.[18]

Features

Xfire had many features, the majority of which can only be used while in-game.

Xfire featured the ability to detect the video game a particular user is running. By analyzing running processes, Xfire can detect active games and send that information to Xfire clients with the current player as a friend. For many games, it can also detect which server users are playing on, the level which is running, and ping times. Using these features, users were also able to see what games their friends are playing, and to join any friends who are currently in-game by having Xfire launch the game and join the friend's server automatically. Xfire logs what games users are playing, how many hours they have played them, and saves other information (such as scores) from game servers. This information can be converted into a PNG image by the server via PHP for every user to use as a signature.

Xfire allowed players to take screenshots in-game and save them to a specified folder, though this only works with games that have Xfire in-game support. Users can select and caption any screenshots they wish to upload and share on their Xfire profile page. Xfire also had the ability to record video in-game, though this can have a significant impact on game performance and recording quality if one has a low-performance system, causing the frame rate to slow dramatically.[19] However, this is typically true of all video recording during gaming, and not unique to Xfire.

To communicate with other users in-game, Xfire users may send and receive instant messages from inside a game in fullscreen mode, regardless of the games the sender or recipient are in. This eliminates the need to minimize the game window. On August 2005, Xfire updated to version 1.43, which added a beta voice chat feature using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to the application called "Xfire Pro-Voice". Until early 2009, if voice chat was being used in a chat room, users had to host the voice chat, causing quality problems and lag due to some users have better system capabilities than others. Xfire hosted the voice chat sessions to resolve quality problems.[20] On May 4, 2009, a built-in alpha AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger plugin was released in 1.108. As of May 4, 2009, it only supported chatting, and none of AIM's other features.[21] Since December 1, 2009, users could access their Twitter accounts through Xfire, allowing players to view updates posted by other users, as well as post their own. Google Talk has also recently been added. In December 2011, Xfire added support for Facebook chatting, enabling users to chat with their Facebook friends from within the game.

The Xfire game software development kit was released with version 1.56 in May 2006. It offered game developers an interface to expose some of the game data to the Xfire application, though this feature is not compatible with all games.

On December 16, 2011, Xfire added a feature to allow its users to capture in-game video and upload it to YouTube.[22] This feature is similar to other popular in-game video recording software products, but allowed users to record videos up to 10 minutes in length for free.

In version 1.63, Xfire released a beta clan system that allows users to create clans or guilds on the Xfire website. Features associated with clans include setting up ranks, favorite games, and the number of hours everyone has been playing. With version 1.85, the Clans & Guilds system was officially released.

Xfire added a video streaming feature in version 1.97. To view a broadcast, a web browser plugin was required, supporting only Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. In version 1.113, released on August 17, 2009, the broadcast system was changed to allow a plugin-less, Flash-based view compatible with any Flash-enabled browser. This feature lets anyone watch a live feed of a user's screen while they are playing a game. Live streams have accompanying chatrooms that let anyone who is watching a live feed communicate.

In-game internet browsing capabilities were added to Xfire in version 1.103. Its homepage is set as a statistics page of the game currently being played by the user, including listing other players and any clans and guilds based around the game being played.

Tournaments

Tournaments allows Xfire users to connect to a free server to play games against others on a separate platform. Users are required to own a Xfire client and a copy of the game should they wish to play in a particular tournament.[23]

Support

As of December 1, 2012, Xfire provided support for more than 3,000 games, of many different genres.[24]

Support for Windows 98 and Windows Me was discontinued as of January 2007.[25]

Third-party modifications and software forking

There were many third party modifications for Xfire's client and services, including skins, infoview templates, plugins, and protocol implementations. Some of these may or may not violate Xfire's terms of service.[26]

Skins can be used to provide a new look to the Xfire client and chat windows, while Infoview skins can be used to provide extra functionality in the Xfire Infoview pane. Skins are made using XML and image files, while Infoviews are made using HTML, JavaScript, and images.

Plugins

There were a variety of third-party plugins developed for use with Xfire.

The following plugins let users chat on Xfire with other instant messaging clients:

Clients

Several Xfire clients were available for different platforms:

References

  1. ↑ "Xfire FAQ". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  2. ↑ "Xfire Front Page". Retrieved January 3, 2014.
  3. ↑ "Xfire". Retrieved June 10, 2015.
  4. ↑ "Xfire". Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  5. ↑ "Ultimate Arena Secures $5 Million Funding and Changes Name to Xfire". Xfire.com. 2004-04-19. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  6. ↑ Corcoran, Elizabeth (2004-09-06). "Finding Friends & Foes". Forbes.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  7. ↑ "History of Scoville". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  8. ↑ "Xfire joins MTV Networks in $102 million cash deal". Gamesindustry.biz. 2006-04-25. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  9. ↑ "Viacom to acquire Xfire, Inc. for $102 million". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  10. ↑ Sinclair, Brendan (2006-09-12). "Viacom says Xfire is PS3-bound - PlayStation 3 News at GameSpot". Gamespot.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  11. ↑ Sinclair, Brendan (2006-10-11). "Untold Legends gets Xfired - PlayStation 3 News at GameSpot". Gamespot.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  12. ↑ "Press release: Xfire Online Game Community Continues Rapid Growth Surpassing Seven Million Registered User Mark". GamesIndustry.biz. Eurogamer Network Ltd. May 7, 2007. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved May 7, 2007.
  13. ↑ "Interview: Mike Cassidy on Leaving Xfire, Joining Benchmark Capital". GameDaily BIZ. June 13, 2007. Retrieved June 13, 2007.
  14. ↑ "Exclusive: Titan Gaming Takes Xfire Off Viacom’s Hands". TechCrunch. August 2, 2010.
  15. ↑ "Xfire sold, development team leaving". New Game Network. August 2, 2010.
  16. ↑ "Xfire Sold Off, Development Team Leaving". Kotaku. August 2, 2010.
  17. ↑ "Xfire profile export". Xfire. June 10, 2015.
  18. ↑ "Xfire Forums". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  19. ↑ "Xfire Video Capture FAQ". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  20. ↑ "About Xfire Pro Voice". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  21. ↑ "Release notes for 1.108". Xfire. May 4, 2009.
  22. ↑ "Xfire Adds New YouTube Feature". Xfire.com. Retrieved 2012-01-03.
  23. ↑ "Battleground". Battleground. Retrieved January 3, 2014.
  24. ↑ "Xfire Supported Games". Xfire. Retrieved August 5, 2009.
  25. ↑ "Download". Xfire. 2011-12-14. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  26. ↑ "Terms and Conditions". Xfire. 2010-08-02. Retrieved 2011-12-19.

External links

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