Xfire 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. Xfire's Livestream 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. History
Xfire, Inc. was founded in 2002 by Dennis "Thresh" Fong, Mike Cassidy, Max
Woon, and David Lawee. 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. The first version of the Xfire desktop
client was code-named Scoville, 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.
In September 2006, Sony was misinterpreted to have announced that
Xfire would be used for the PlayStation 3. 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.
On May 7, 2007, Xfire announced that they had reached 7 million registered
users. Shortly after, on June 13, 2007, co-founder and former CEO Mike Cassidy
departed the company to work for venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. 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. 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
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 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.
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. 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. = 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.
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 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. 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 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. 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. 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.
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. Support
As of December 1, 2012, Xfire provided support for more than 3,000 games, of
many different genres. Support for Windows 98 and Windows Me
was discontinued as of January 2007. = 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.
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.
Xfire Plus: A set of extension programs and files to enhance the Xfire client.
Programs such as the music plugin allow displaying information about music as it
plays. Xfire2Phone: A plugin that uses
VirtualAudioCable and Gmail to set up a link to any phone in the US for free, in
order to allow users to connect to landline or mobile phone.
OpenFire: An open source Java API and suite of tools to access the Xfire
instant messaging network. Xfirelib: An open source library written
in C++ which implements the Xfire protocol. Based on it is an Extensible
Messaging and Presence Protocol gateway to Xfire which also implements Gamers
Own Instant Messenger extensions to the XMPP protocol.
The following plugins let users chat on Xfire with other instant messaging
clients: Gfire: A Pidgin plugin for Linux and
Windows that lets users chat and see what games friends are playing. It has
most of the major Xfire features: group chat, clan chat, file transfer, avatars,
server, and game detection. Kopete plugin: A plugin that lets users
chat and see the status of friends. Miranda IM plugin: A plugin that allows
users to chat with others on Xfire, detect games, and more.
Trillian plugin: Users may chat and see the status of friends, while detecting
when users run games. As of 2010, the plugin does not work, due to protocol
changes. Xblaze: An open source plugin for Adium
that allows communication over the Xfire protocol, using the MacFire
implementation. It is the first Xfire client for Mac OS X.
= Clients = Several Xfire clients were available for
different platforms: Xblaze: An iPhone client for the iPhone
and iPod Touch based on the MacFire implementation that allows communicating
over Xfire. MacFire: An open source implementation
for of the Xfire network protocol for Mac OS X. It was made possible, in part,
by prior work done for Xblaze, XfireLib, and OpenFire.
BlackFire: A client for Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
References External links
Official website