Forget Discord, Gamers Need a New Xfire

Discord is an excellent community chat app, but it has somewhat strayed from its original focus on being a universal gamer-centric platform. While Steam is great for games within Valve’s platform, we still lack a universal third-party app that does it all. This is something Xfire once offered.

What Was Xfire?

Xfire was a free gaming-focused chat app and server browser. It was originally created by Chris Kirmse, a Yahoo engineer who struggled to find other players and servers for his favorite games. For reference, if you wanted to play an online game in the 2000s, you had to find and join an online server yourself.

These games had built-in server browsers, but they weren’t great for finding your friends. Third-party apps got around this using console commands like “connect” or “join,” followed by the server address. This made it possible to join a server that was advertised in an IRC channel, for example.

Xfire provided an easy way to find and join game servers directly from the desktop, similar to GameSpy, so it quickly gained a lot of popularity. The server information on Xfire was pretty basic—you could see the name, player count, and ping. Still, it was more than enough to determine if a server had a spot for you and your friends and whether the ping was playable.

You might not have heard of Xfire, but the app had over 24 million registered accounts by 2014, though it was shut down soon after in 2016. Xfire was so large at one point that it rivaled Steam, which had much of the same functionality. This included instant messaging and a configurable overlay with a built-in web browser.

The web browser was especially useful; you could easily look up information without having to leave your game at a time when PCs were slow and smartphones didn’t exist.

However, Steam eventually overtook Xfire, thanks to its game store. This meant players were more likely to just use Steam for their community needs instead of a separate app. You can read about the rise and eventual downfall of Xfire in this Built In article by Hal Koss.

While server browsing was one of its core functionalities, Xfire could do so much more than that. Whenever users requested a feature, Xfire would add it, and unlike so many other apps today, the app managed to avoid feeling bloated as it grew. It retained its dead-simple interface and didn’t use a whole lot of computational resources, which was vital for a client that was always running alongside your game.

I Miss Xfire’s Convenient Chat and Voice

Perhaps the main thing that made Xfire so good was its popularity. Nearly every gamer in my circle had Xfire, so not having an Xfire account was like not having Instagram today. Xfire even allowed you to log in via Facebook at a time when Facebook was the main social media platform, which meant you could easily play games with all of your Facebook friends, with no additional steps required.

Xfire had a simple chat interface reminiscent of Discord and Steam but with fewer complications. You could easily add more people to the chat, start a voice call, and join someone’s game with a simple push of a button. Discord also allows you to join players from the platform, but it only works for just a few games like PUBG, and you have to be given permission to join.

Inviting new people to a chat didn’t involve roles and permissions like on Discord servers, so it was easy to make new friends and start playing games with them. Speaking of making friends, one of the coolest features was the “Friends of Friends Playing” tab, which allowed you to see what your friends’ friends were playing.

That’s how I found my first local World of Warcraft community. A special shout-out goes to the in-game overlay, which supports all the same features to ensure you can organize a new session without leaving the game.

A Universal Game Time Tracker

The Xfire feature I miss the most is game time tracking. Xfire tracked how much time you had spent in any game, and it’d show the hours spent on your account on the website. The time spent in a game was a badge of honor in my local community—the more hours you had, the cooler you were. Some gamers were so obsessed with racking up hours played that they’d leave their PCs on overnight just to record more game hours.

While Steam can track game hours for Steam games, it doesn’t work for non-Steam games. And with seemingly every large game publisher now having its own proprietary game launcher, we’ve never been further away from a universal game platform. Discord can show others what game you’re playing and even join them, but it doesn’t work for all games.

There are some universal game time tracking solutions available, but none of them are particularly popular. Remember, Xfire was used by tens of millions of gamers. The only app that could pull off a universal game tracker that people care about is Discord, but Discord doesn’t even have proper account pages at the time of writing.

Game Server Browsers Need to Make a Comeback

Server browsers were awesome, and while we don’t really need them for newer games, it’d still be nice to have the option. I am part of a Battlefield V Discord community that hosts its own private, moderated servers that guarantee a cheater-free experience, but Battlefield V players who aren’t aware of the Discord server have no way to find us.

If Xfire were to make a return, it could provide a universal server browser for all games, and it could easily implement Discord-style communities for servers that’d make for a better online gaming experience for everyone. Plus, it could give you the opportunity to discover new game modes, custom maps, and servers with mods. I remember using Xfire to play Call of Duty 2 zombie maps long before the franchise officially introduced zombies.

It’s worth mentioning that there are a few active communities for old games, and the lack of server browsers makes it difficult to find active servers. Game Tracker is one of the few vintage server browsers still around, and it’s on its last legs. I just hope that someone will create an Xfire-style solution sooner rather than later.