Xfire Kills PC App and Website in Favor of eSports

Hey, are you one of the 24 million people who used Xfire (the app that let you, chat with friends, livestream, capture video, and take screenshots with relative ease and surprisingly little impact on your hardware) on their gaming PC? It was a lot like Steam without the game selling part, and was one of the best social sites for gamers.

Yeah, apparently Xfire’s team is done with that whole business that most people actually wanted, and are instead going to be doing eSports now! Because, the fact that Xfire was more popular than the original eSports website that birthed it was apparently forgotten by the Xfire team. It’s one giant circle, going from what didn’t really work, to what millions loved, to go back to what didn’t work in hopes that now it will.

If I sound bitter in this, understand I am one of the people who still actively uses Xfire. Before Steam, Xbox One’s Upload Studio, and PlayStation 4’s streaming integration, this is what we had, and it worked amazingly well. Xfire was a rock solid client, with plenty of active users. Even after a debacle 2010 when a new parent company took over and replaced most of the staff and pushed for a new website design, the idea of the client dying seemed absurd. That’s saying something, considering how badly that relaunch went.

How badly did it go? Well, so many people rejected the new design that they had to reopen the original site to people. They eventually forced the new design, but by that point, it didn’t seem like the service would be cancelled. Now, only two days (as of this writing) before the service is killed, we find out that it is being dropped. If you look up Xfire’s social site, you now get this.

Nevermind that they could have sold the chat client, which would have made a lot more sense and upset way less people. No, instead, it has been dropped in favor of the new, eSports-only Xfire, “the Ultimate Tournament Platform”. You can download all your videos and screenshots from the website before the 12th. After that, everything Xfire once was, is going to be gone.

It was a good run Xfire. Here’s hoping Valve keeps upgrading Steam into a potential replacement client.