Xfire

Xfire began life as Ultimate Arena, a Menlo Park company founded in 2002 by Dennis "Thresh" Fong, Mike Cassidy, Max Woon and David Lawee, where players bet money against each other in tournaments. Chris Kirmse, an engineer from Yahoo's games division who had built a tool to see when friends were online and join their game servers, came aboard in 2003, and the team built a desktop client code-named Scoville. "We launched Xfire in the middle of January of 2004," Kirmse recalled. It grew faster than the website it was meant to support, so the company took the client's name. "By August of 2004, I think we had about 10,000 simultaneous users and a million registered users."

The client watched your running processes, worked out which game you had open, and told your friends, along with the server you were on and your ping. Friends could click to launch the game and join you automatically. Because it drew its own window over full-screen games, you could read and answer instant messages without alt-tabbing, which in 2004 felt like magic; Kirmse says it was "one of the first in-game overlays." Xfire logged your hours per game and turned them into profile stats, and over the years it added screenshots, video capture, a voice chat called Pro-Voice in 2005 and Flash-based live streaming in 2009. Its Top Ten list ranked games by hours played, and World of Warcraft held the top spot for years until League of Legends passed it in June 2011.

On April 25, 2006, Viacom's MTV Networks bought Xfire for $102 million. Most of the original team left soon after. "What ended up happening next was basically nothing all that great," Kirmse said. The service kept growing on momentum, reaching 7 million registered users in May 2007 and more than 24 million by 2014, but on August 2, 2010, Viacom sold it to Titan Gaming, a small matchmaking startup. "The day that deal closed, I had to lay off almost everyone, including myself," Kirmse said. A pivot toward China followed, and then the end: on June 10, 2015, Xfire announced its social services would close two days later; messaging stopped on June 27, and the last services went dark on April 30, 2016. Discord had made its first release in 2015, the year Xfire's social side closed. Mark Donovan's verdict, in Built In's oral history of the company: "I think they sold too quickly, and to a media company that didn't understand technology."