Xfire Bought By Titan Gaming

Xfire, one of the first chat services that included social networking features like gametime clocking, server browser and a myriad of other features, was purchased by Titan Gaming yesterday. According to TechCrunch, Titan — who only have $1 million in venture capital — made the purchase despite Viacom’s acquisition of Xfire in 2006 for around $100 million.

According to a message left by a staff member, “most of the team” are leaving the company.

Xfire was pretty spiffy back in the day, before Steam and Raptr. The service did have a few cool features, like live video streaming which you would think would be very popular in the competitive gaming scene. The interface was an abortion though. Sure, you could customize it with some pretty cool skins, but I never really got the functionality out of it that I should have. I feel like it never really caught on as it came out before Raptr and before Steam started offering 3rd party launcher and overlay support.

It strikes me as a bit out of place that a property that was purchased for roughly $100 million by Viacom four years ago is going to a company that has raised less than a 100th of that figure in venture capital funding. Sure, Xfire hasn’t blown up like a lot of other services have, but it still has a lot of potential for live, competitive game commentary and the like.

TechCrunch were issued a statment from Titan, which reads:

Xfire redefined how gamers communicate, Titan intends to build upon this tradition and utilize the Xfire platform to help gaming companies better engage and monetize their games.

Whatever this means, it seems like a logical step for Xfire to do something involving socialization and content distribution. Maybe we’ll see something like the ijji game portal launched through Xfire, or something that my feeble, non-forward thinking mind can’t begin to imagine.

If the original developers are indeed getting fired, I wish the best of luck to the now ex-Xfire staff, and I hope their product doesn’t get shoved under a rug to stagnate like many other social-media properties these days.