Xfire

Xfire

Screenshot Screenshot of Xfire Client version 1.143, showing a list of buddies with the new Phoenix skin
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 had been the most played game for many years, but was surpassed by League of Legends on June 20, 2011.

Xfire hosted events every month, which included 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 were 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 would be shut down on Friday, June 12. The home page for the social part of Xfire at that time linked 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

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

^[18]

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.^[19] There has been a settlement between the companies as of January 31, 2006. More details were posted to Xfire's forums.

Features

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

Xfire featured the ability to detect the video game a particular user was running. By analyzing running processes, Xfire could detect active games and then send that information to the Xfire servers. Other user's clients would then be updated with this information. For many games, it could also detect which server users were playing on, the level which was running, and ping times. Using these features, users were also able to see what games their friends were playing, and to join any friends who were currently in-game by having Xfire launch the game and join the friend's server automatically. Xfire logged what games users were playing, how many hours they had played them, and saved other information (such as scores) from game servers. This information could 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 worked with games that had Xfire in-game support. Users could select and caption any screenshots they wished to upload and share on their Xfire profile page. Xfire also had the ability to record video in-game, though this often had a significant impact on game performance and recording quality if one had a low-performance system, causing the frame rate to drop dramatically.^[20] However, this is typically true of all video recording during gaming, and was not unique to Xfire.

The clients main function was as an instant messenger. Similar to other such online services, any user who had been added as a 'friend' could be immediately contacted through text chat. To communicate with other users in-game, Xfire users could send and receive instant messages from inside any game that was running in full screen mode, regardless of the games the sender or recipient were in. This eliminated the need to minimize the game window. Users were also able to directly send files to one another via the chat 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.^[21] 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.^[22] From 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 was also subsequently been added. In December 2011, Xfire added support for Facebook chatting, enabling users to chat with their Facebook friends from within the game.

On December 16, 2011, Xfire added a feature to allow its users to capture in-game video and upload it to YouTube.^[23] This feature was similar to other popular in-game video recording software products, but allowed users to record videos up to 10 minutes in length for free.

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 let anyone watch a live feed of a user's screen while they were playing a game. Live streams had accompanying chat rooms that let anyone who was watching a live feed communicate.

In-game internet browsing capabilities were added to Xfire in version 1.103. Its homepage was 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.

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

Plugins

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

• OpenFire: An open source (LGPL licensed) 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 (XMPP) gateway to Xfire which also implements Gamers Own Instant Messenger (GOIM) 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.
• 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:

• 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