Xfire has been a part of my life for over a decade.

I started using Xfire before Steam. It was the first IM client of my childhood. It was where I talked with most of my friends from middle school through high school. It was my first foray into online gaming. It was there for my transition from an MMORPG player, to an RTS player, to an FPS player.

And even after my Xfire friends list went dark; when all of my boyhood friends grew out of gaming, or didn't have the time for it anymore, or moved to Steam, I still kept using Xfire. Rarely was there a day that I did not have Xfire open.

Because Xfire was still the best in the industry. Xfire tracked my hours spent on games much more accurately than Steam for quite some time. Posting screenshots was much easier and faster than it was on Steam. Xfire was always ahead of everyone else, adding video recording and streaming for games first.

But there came a time when Xfire lost its edge. When Steam's privacy settings and better control over screenshots overtook Xfire's, and it developed the very same features that Xfire had for years (in-game streaming was only recently added to Steam). Surely, Xfire's death was inevitable?

But what about those of us who worked so hard for Xfire? How many of us manually edited the xfire_games.ini so it would properly detect our games? How many of us helped make Xfire better by testing the newest builds? How many of us used Xfire Plus, or contributed on the Xfire forums? How many hours did we spend for our love of this client, and not just our games?

Xfire still has a unique feature that no other program in the world can compare to—game detection. Steam's game detection is fairly simple. You start the process via its client, and it simply tracks the status of that process. Xfire, on the other hand, had to detect whether your game was open, from amongst hundreds of entries. This was the pinnacle of Xfire.

But when we received this dreaded message, quickly and without warning:

http://social.xfire.com/

Our profiles were made inaccessible, and we were only given the option to download our screenshots and videos... what about our hours? What about our profiles, that some of us edited and kept up-to-date with all our gaming pride?

It cannot end like this. We cannot allow Xfire to die like this. If Xfire were made open source, then we could decentralize Xfire. Developers would be free to start their own update servers, and build networks of trust amongst users who still want to use Xfire to log their gaming hours, or post screenshots and videos to. All while retaining and building on the IM qualities of Xfire itself.

Or what if you are a lone user, and you simply want to use Xfire to log your games that are not on Steam or Origin? You could create a local service daemon that would keep track of all your hours. The user could even import hours from Steam into the local service, regaining at least some of the data lost already.

Making the Xfire client open source will ensure that it lives on forever, at no cost to Xfire Corporate. Xfire can become a standard-setter in the industry again! Please, give this next generation of gamers a chance to have the childhood I did—growing up on Xfire.