![]() ![]() ![]() ” Within about a week, we convinced the rest of the company that this was a good idea. The next day, he was like, “Yeah, we can do that with an LSP. What if, instead of requiring an SDK, we did some sort of hack around the problems of the Yahoo Messenger system that we had made a few years earlier? At two in the morning, I sent an email to one of the developers. Kirmse: I thought back to that idea I had at Yahoo. There were just no good solutions for that need.Ĭassidy: Chris also had been thinking about this. Kirmse: Lots of people wanted to play online games, and they wanted to keep talking to their friends while in game. A lot of times they’d say, “I didn’t really like losing money, but I really liked your product, because it made it easy to play on the same game server as my friend.” Mike Cassidy (Ultimate Arena/Xfire CEO, 2003-2007): We got some useful feedback in exit interviews with customers. Eventually, Kirmse left Yahoo, and in 2003 joined the company Ultimate Arena, which facilitated a tournament-style gaming site where players could bet money against each other.Ĭhris Kirmse (VP of engineering): A month after I started at Ultimate Arena, we were in a meeting, looking at the numbers. While at Yahoo, Kirmse and Brian Gottlieb developed a computer system where someone could see what game server their friend was playing on and then use Yahoo Messenger to join. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. In 2015, Xfire shut its messaging services down for good. It was a genuine Silicon Valley success story. Xfire grew a hardcore fan base of tens of millions of users, and eventually got acquired in a nine-figure deal. It also pioneered and popularized many features that are ubiquitous in gaming platforms today, like stat tracking, screenshot capture, in-game voice chat, peer-to-peer file sharing and live streaming. Xfire kept track of where and when gamers played online, and allowed them to instant message each other in game. First for Yahoo, and then later, as a standalone product at a company called Xfire. He wanted an easy way to see when his brother was online so that he could join his game and talk with him. T rying to run an instant messaging program alongside a game didn’t work well either.Ĭhris Kirmse, an engineer in Yahoo’s games division in the late ’ 90s and early 2000s, was annoyed by this. Most people still didn’t own a cell phone, and home phone lines were often tied up with modems. In the early 2000s, it was pretty much impossible to coordinate an online game with your friends and chat together while playing. ![]()
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