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.
History
The company was founded in December 2007 by
Kieran O'Neill
Kieran Lewis O'Neill (born 19 August 1987) is an English entrepreneur best known for founding several Internet companies.
He started one of the first video sharing websites, similar to YouTube, when he was 15 and sold it aged 19 for $1.25M. He stu ...
, 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, 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.
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
is a video gaming brand that consists of five home video game consoles, two handhelds, a media center, and a smartphone, as well as an online service and multiple magazines. The brand is produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment, a divisi ...
gamercard which attracted a large number of gamers to the service. The site iterated through a number of features, and introduced automatic tracking of
Xbox 360,
PlayStation 3 and
PC gameplay in March 2011.
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.
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 and PlayStation 4.
In January 2014, Playfire launched its Rewards BETA. the Rewards BETA encourages users to link their
Steam
Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization ...
account to their Playfire account in order to earn Green Man Gaming store Credit. Available Rewards are listed daily on the Playfire Rewards. Page and by May 2014, over one million Rewards had been given out to BETA participants
Playfire sponsored the Most Played Game Award at the 32nd
Golden Joystick Awards, and sponsored the Gamers' Choice Award at the Games Media Awards 2014 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. Later, on 5 May 2017
Green Man Gaming announced is coming to a close this year. As of 30 May 2017 Playfire was merged with GMG Community with its websit
playfire.comnow redirecting t
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.
References
{{Reflist
British social networking websites
Defunct social networking services
Defunct video game companies of the United Kingdom