Xfire Marks the Spot

The answer, most likely, is no. And that's good news for Dennis Fong and Mike Cassidy, the co-founders of Xfire. Cassidy, the former CEO of Direct Hit, and Fong, a former professional gamer better known as Thresh, set out nearly five years ago to create an application to enhance online gaming experiences. They founded Xfire and the company's namesake product, and the software has spread like a virus throughout the gaming world.

How fast has Xfire grown? On average, nearly 300,000 new users register and download the software each month, which means Xfire adds approximately 10,000 new customers every day. Xfire has become so hot so quickly that Fortune Magazine's David Kirkpatrick recently wrote that Xfire "could be the next MySpace." It's an accurate comparison. The best way to think of Xfire is as a combination of a social networking site and an instant messaging platform. In addition to allowing users the ability to text message or voice chat with other Xfire members, the software allows users to create an entire online community. "We wanted to find a better way for people to interact through video games and be able to communicate with one another," Fong says.

Dennis Fong

Xfire is an inevitable invention, the kind of product that's such a no-brainer that your curse yourself for not thinking of it first. That's not meant to downplay the achievement of the company; on the contrary, it's the highest praise I can think of because Cassidy and Fong have correctly anticipated and identified a new kind of social dynamic within the video game generation. Instead of adhering to the stereotype of the video game player as a loner sitting in solitude on his or her computer, Fong says, the company subscribed to another theory that gamers were extremely social beings. "They want to play online with their friends," says Fong, now Xfire's chief gaming officer. "They care about what games their friends are playing."

It's a good bet that many Xfire users are playing World of Warcraft, the mega-popular MMORPG that has consistently been the highest rated game in the Xfire network in terms of minutes played. "World of Warcraft is the most popular game on Xfire by far," Fong says. "The game has nearly 6 million players, and we've got only a little more than half that number of registered users, so it's a huge opportunity for us." Amazingly, by the end of the day, Xfire users will have played 125 years worth of time on World of Warcraft in a single day. Quite simply, by the time you're done reading this article, Xfire may have 3.5 million users - or more.