Playfire

Playfire was a social gaming networking website targeted towards core video game players. Playfire allowed users the ability to automatically track their in-game achievements, trophies, and gameplay, as well as earn rewards for playing their games.

Playfire
Playfire logo
Type of site
Social network service
Available inEnglish
FoundedDecember 2007 in London, UK
Dissolved30 may 2017
HeadquartersLondon, United Kingdom
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s)Kieran O'Neill, Sophia Hayes, Ben Phillips
Key peoplePaul Sulyok (Co-Founder & CEO Green Man Gaming & Playfire)
IndustrySocial networking service, video games
CommercialYes
RegistrationRequired
Launched30 March 2008 (2008-03-30)
Current statusInactive

History

The company was founded in December 2007 by Kieran O'Neill, Sophia Hayes & Ben Phillips and Playfire was first launched into private BETA in March 2008. A public BETA followed in June 2008. Playfire secured £1.3m Funding in November 2009,[1] and went on to be acquired by Green Man Gaming in 2012. At the time of acquisition, Playfire had more than 1.2 million users tracking over 50,000 video games on the website.[2]

Before creating Playfire, two of the Playfire founders had started and ran a PlayStation 3 focused news and forums website called PlayStation Universe. The idea for Playfire came from observing how gamers included information about themselves such as their PSN ID, recently played games and other things in their signatures below each forum post.

Playfire was the first website to release a PlayStation gamercard which attracted a large number of gamers to the service.[3] The site iterated through a number of features, and introduced automatic tracking of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC gameplay in March 2011.[4]

In September 2011 Playfire partnered with GameSpot to bring Playfire users profile to GameSpot through an API partnership.

On 9 July 2012 Playfire was acquired by digital games retailer Green Man Gaming.[5]

At the end of 2013, Green Man Gaming announced that its Playfire service was able to track in-game achievements/trophies and gameplay on Xbox One[6] and PlayStation 4.[7]

In January 2014, Playfire launched its Rewards BETA.[8] the Rewards BETA encourages users to link their Steam account to their Playfire account in order to earn Green Man Gaming store Credit.[9] Available Rewards are listed daily on the Playfire Rewards. Page[10] and by May 2014, over one million Rewards had been given out to BETA participants[11]

Playfire sponsored the Most Played Game Award at the 32nd Golden Joystick Awards,[12] and sponsored the Gamers' Choice Award at the Games Media Awards 2014[13] in October 2014.

In blog post on 7 November 2016, Green Man Gaming announced that Playfire is closing. It will be merged with their new "Community" site that GMG made on the Muut platform.[14] Later, on 5 May 2017 Green Man Gaming announced is coming to a close this year.[15] As of 30 May 2017 Playfire was merged with GMG Community with its website playfire.com now redirecting to greenmangaming.com/playfire.

Investment

Playfire initially raised £1.3m in funding from investors including Niklas Zennström (the founder of Skype), Michael Birch (the founder of Bebo), Chris Deering (the former Chairman of SCE), William Reeve (the founder of LOVEFiLM) and others.[16]

References
  1. "Kieran O'Neill receives £1.3m backing for Playfire". Startups.co.uk. November 25, 2013.
  2. Butcher, Mike (February 24, 2012). "Playfire Hits A Million Users Of Its Analytics For Gamers".
  3. Alexander, Leigh (July 8, 2008). "Playfire Launches PS3 Trophies Gamercard Service". Kotaku.com.
  4. Tom Cheshire (August 17, 2011). "Playfire: The social network dedicated to gamers". Wired. Archived from the original on December 1, 2011.
  5. OMRI PETITTE (July 9, 2012). "Green Man Gaming merges with gaming social network Playfire". VentureBeat.
  6. "Playfire now tracking Xbox One - This Is Xbox". 10 December 2013.
  7. "Gamasutra - The Art & Business of Making Games". Gamasutra. 2013-12-23.
  8. Matthew Jarvis (January 30, 2014). "Green Man Gaming launches Playfire Rewards beta". PC Retail.
  9. "Get paid to play Steam games with Playfire". September 10, 2014. Archived from the original on September 11, 2014.
  10. "Rewards BETA - Playfire".
  11. "Playfire blazes through the ONE MILLION rewards mark!". MCV UK. May 7, 2014.
  12. "Playfire announces Most Played Golden Joystick". PC Gamer. October 21, 2014.
  13. "Games Media Awards: Gamers' Choice vote is open now". MCV UK. September 30, 2014.
  14. "New community platform on the way". November 7, 2016.
  15. "Farewell, Playfire". May 5, 2017.
  16. O'Hear, Steve (November 10, 2009). "Confirmed: Gamer social network Playfire secures $2.1m Series A". Techcrunch.
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