Playfire
Playfire was a website for video game players to help gaming networking. Playfire helped users to track their in-game awards, achievements and gameplay. Kieran O'Neill, Sophia Hayes & Ben Phillips opened the company in December 2007. Playfire was the first website to release a PlayStation gamercard. It attracted a big number of gamers.[1] The site brought in an automatic tracking of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC gameplay in March 2011.[2]
Investment
Playfire got £1.3m in funding from investors such as 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.[3]
History
The idea for Playfire came from watching the gamers adding information about themselves such as their PSN ID, recently played games, and other things in their signatures under every forum post.
In September 2011 Playfire united with GameSpot to bring Playfire users profile to GameSpot through an API collaboration.
On 9 July 2012 Playfire was bought by Green Man Gaming.[4]
At the end of 2013, Green Man Gaming said that Playfire service was able to track in-game achievements/trophies and gameplay on Xbox One[5] and PlayStation 4.[6]
In January 2014, Playfire started its Rewards BETA.[7] the Rewards BETA motivated users to link their Steam account to their Playfire account in order to earn Green Man Gaming store Credit.[8] Available Rewards are listed daily on the Playfire Rewards. Page[9] and by May 2014, over one million Rewards had been given out to BETA participants[10]
Playfire was the sponsor of the Most Played Game Award at the 32nd Golden Joystick Awards,[11] and sponsored the Gamers' Choice Award at the Games Media Awards 2014[12] in October 2014.
In blog post on 7 November 2016, Green Man Gaming said that Playfire is closing. It will be united with their new "Community" site that GMG made on the Muut platform.[13] Later, on 5 May 2017 Green Man Gaming said that it is coming to a close this year.[14] As of 30 May 2017 Playfire was united with GMG Community with its website playfire.com. Now it is redirecting to greenmangaming.com/playfire.
References
- ↑ Alexander, Leigh (July 8, 2008). "Playfire Launches PS3 Trophies Gamercard Service". Kotaku.com. Archived from the original on March 14, 2017. Retrieved October 6, 2021.
- ↑ Tom Cheshire (August 17, 2011). "Playfire: The social network dedicated to gamers". Wired. Archived from the original on December 1, 2011.
- ↑ O'Hear, Steve (November 10, 2009). "Confirmed: Gamer social network Playfire secures $2.1m Series A". Techcrunch.
- ↑ OMRI PETITTE (July 9, 2012). "Green Man Gaming merges with gaming social network Playfire". VentureBeat.
- ↑ "Playfire now tracking Xbox One - This Is Xbox". 10 December 2013.
- ↑ "Gamasutra - The Art & Business of Making Games". Gamasutra. 2013-12-23.
- ↑ Matthew Jarvis (January 30, 2014). "Green Man Gaming starts Playfire Rewards beta". PC Retail.
- ↑ "Get paid to play Steam games with Playfire". September 10, 2014. Archived from the original on September 11, 2014.
- ↑ "Rewards BETA - Playfire".
- ↑ "Playfire blazes through the ONE MILLION rewards mark!". MCV UK. May 7, 2014.
- ↑ "Playfire announces Most Played Golden Joystick". PC Gamer. October 21, 2014.
- ↑ "Games Media Awards: Gamers' Choice vote is open now". MCV UK. September 30, 2014.
- ↑ "New community platform on the way". November 7, 2016.
- ↑ "Farewell, Playfire". May 5, 2017.