Xfire: Building Community For PC Gamers

Here he takes a few minutes to chat with DAM about how Xfire is filling some of the holes created when developers are up against deadlines and need to sacrifice some of their game’s community-building features.

DAM: Chris, tell us a little about the early days at Xfire.

Chris Kirmse: Xfire actually started out as a company called Ultimate Arena which had a different product that was relatively popular but wasn’t make much money, and so we were looking for new ideas. I came up with the notion of being able to join your friends in an online game but without the game’s developers having to do any work. We built an early beta and then released it to the public in Jan. 2004 -- and it just took off.

DAM: So this is really a product or a service that you’re offering?

Kirmse: Xfire is a service, a client server system that’s like an IM program with both text and voice chat … but instead of just seeing when your friends are online, you also see if your friends are playing a game … and if they’re playing an online game, you get to see information about the server they’re playing on. Then, with one mouse click, you can join that friend in that game if you also own the game.

We’ve also added tons and tons of other features: Xfire is a really good server browser, it’s also a good system for messaging your friends inside of games, we also have a screenshot feature that lets you take screenshots inside a game and automatically upload them to your profile page on our Web site. And our Web site is a really popular community area where you can trade messages with your friends, you can set a custom avatar, you get to show off the screenshots of your game, you get to post blog entries talking about the games you’ve been playing and about what’s new.

DAM: Xfire sounds like it’s sort of an Xbox Live for the PC, is that right?

Kirmse: Some people have said that we’re very much like Xbox Live for the PC and certainly there are a lot of similar features. They are more console-focused in terms of how they design their entire system while we are focused primarily on PC gamers. I think there is a certain set of common features about trying to bring friends together through online games.

DAM: Does this work with any PC game or only with games that are specifically supported by your site?

Kirmse: We need to do work specifically for each game that Xfire is going to work with. It’s not all that much work; it’s primarily testing to ensure that all of our features aren’t going to interfere with the game. Our prime directive so to speak is to not cause any harm with people playing games. So before we add support for a game, we actually have a couple of people spend a significant amount of time testing the game to make sure that we don’t cause any additional problems with the game. Over the last few years, we’ve added support for over 900 PC games which is the vast majority of games that are actually played on PCs.

DAM: None of the games are on your server; the game actually has to be purchased through retail by the gamer … and then they access their friends through your service.

Kirmse: That’s right. We’re not a gaming site ourselves. What we do is all of the community features around a game.

DAM: Now there are a lot of games that feature multi-player options and have these features built in. Doesn’t Xfire just duplicate something that’s already in some games?

Kirmse: Very, very few games actually have the capability to find a friend inside the game and join them in a game. It’s surprisingly uncommon. At the same time, even for games that support that, the player would have to go into the game to see if their friends want to join them in that game. That’s not a very good user experience. So a person will run Xfire on their desktop -- I think our average is around 90 hours a month now -- and they just leave it running all day, every day. Let’s say you only have an hour to play games every night. Well, if you and your friends are only going to play an hour every night, the chances of you actually overlapping your play times is relatively small. But with Xfire, you get to see when your friend is playing and you can choose to overlap your time on purpose.

DAM: What is the business model here? Do I as a gamer have to pay a subscription fee?

Kirmse: Xfire is entirely ad-supported. We have a small advertisement within the Xfire client itself … and we also have advertising on our Web site. Advertisers looking to reach the young male audience primarily are ad buyers on Xfire.

DAM: So if I want to sign up for Xfire, I would go onto your site … and what would I do? Sign up and download a piece of software?

Kirmse: That’s right. You’d download Xfire … which is a very prominent link on our home page … and it steps you through the process of registering your free account and then logging you into the client. And then it sets you up with other people through our friend system which is basically an introduction to Xfire so that you see other people playing even though you may not have set up a lot of friends yet. This is really an interesting thing for game developers in that games that are popular on Xfire have the ability to spread to other potential players much faster than games that aren’t popular on Xfire. That’s because people will look through their list and see what their friends and the friends of their friends are playing? And if there’s a new game that shows up predominantly on their list, then they are more likely to go buy the game so they can play that game with their friends.

DAM: Give me some stats about the number of subscribers you have currently.

Kirmse: We’ve been live for about 3-1/2 years and we have over 7-1/2 million registered users in over 100 users with our site being translated into 12 different languages. At any given time we have close to 300,000 players online running Xfire.

DAM: You people were acquired by Viacom’s MTV Networks last year. What has that done to your company besides given you some more money?

Kirmse: [laughs] That’s right, we were acquired by them in early summer of 2006. And it’s been a really good experience. We’re still an independent unit that’s fully owned by MTV Networks. But we’re still in the same offices, we have most of the same developers and team working on the same goal -- which is improving the user experience around games.

DAM: How often do you add new games to the service?

Kirmse: We’re constantly improving the entire system, both the instant messaging application as well as the Web site and game support. So we actually add 5-10 games every week; even if there are no new PC games released in a week, we’re always adding support for older games. Then we also do a Web site or application update every week as well. Since we’ve been live, we’ve actually done 79 client server releases, which is really very different from the way most software development companies work. It allows us to keep refining our work and be very focused on fixing bugs and responding to what our users tell us they want.

DAM: Who is Xfire’s main competition?

Kirmse: There are quite a few competitors now, like GameSpy Comrade, Steam Community, and PlayLink. Quite a few have cropped up in the last year, and many have specifically said that they are trying to compete with Xfire. Trying to build community around games is definitely a growing area in the game world. That’s because people are very, very passionate about games.

You know, game developers only have so much time to spend on their games. And often the first thing that falls through the cracks are all of these community features around the game. So we really fill that hole very nicely.