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Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

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21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#21
post #11

Pretty actually. How hard would it be to include physical Playstation games by scanning the barcode or something like that? For consoles it still makes sense to buy discs... they're discounted a lot more and faster than the digital versions. And with me having a more than respectable backlog, I almost always buy on disc and almost always after it's discounted by 50%.

I would guess that's pretty doable for our mobile version, but I can't promise without doing some PoC fist

But it would probably to this: - Scan the Barcode - Fetch the product name from it and try finding a match in our database (ManticoreSearch does a good job in finding matches with similar names)

It all depends on if the product name would even be there at all, or if it can be retrieved easily

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#22
post #11

Pretty actually. How hard would it be to include physical Playstation games by scanning the barcode or something like that? For consoles it still makes sense to buy discs... they're discounted a lot more and faster than the digital versions. And with me having a more than respectable backlog, I almost always buy on disc and almost always after it's discounted by 50%.

I would guess that's pretty doable for our mobile version, but I can't promise without doing some PoC fist But it would probably to this: - Scan the Barcode - Fetch the product name from it and try finding a match in our database (ManticoreSearch does a good job in finding matches with similar names) It all depends on if the product name would even be there at all, or if it can be retrieved easily

Since i don't have a Playstation console currently, can you tell me if disk games are also featured in your library? (E.g. other users may see them when they enter your profile)

If they are, you could import them directly from our PSN integration.

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#23
post #11

Pretty actually. How hard would it be to include physical Playstation games by scanning the barcode or something like that? For consoles it still makes sense to buy discs... they're discounted a lot more and faster than the digital versions. And with me having a more than respectable backlog, I almost always buy on disc and almost always after it's discounted by 50%.

Pretty trivial, I built a browser scanner for my phone using a QR scanner library[1], while browsers are contemplating adding an API natively.[2] You would just need to use a lookup service for the UPN of the game title. [1]: https://github.com/mebjas/html5-qrcode [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Barcode_Det...

That looks really cool, and i believe we could do something by trying to match the game title's with our database. Thanks for the heads up!

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#24
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GoG Galaxy can handle Steam games too... Probably not the proprietary launchers for the top predators... Blizz, EA, Ubisoft...

I have been using GOG Galaxy to try and track my entire collection but of course its connections to other gaming services are always broken. I've heard that other tools like Playnite work better but I've not gotten enough motivation to try as yet. I prefer Steam's well-integrated interface. It would be nice if it could scrape other launchers too.

After my endeavours with various store APIs and trying to get all of them to fit with our constraints, i understand why GOG Galaxy is always broken

Most of their external APIs suck tbh. Steam and PSN were the best experience i had, and the PSN one is not even officially documented. Epic doesn't even let you use their user library endpoints if you are not a partner unfortunately...

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#25
I built mal for videogames too over 10 years ago. A friend also did individually. And I know at least 5 other sites that are "mal, but videogames" or have similar features.

Imo the concept is a waste of time until there are APIs for each console/store to fetch user data and automate libraries. Most users don't bother and the few that do already have accounts spread on like 10 different sites for this kind of thing. Personally these days I just keep csv files of my collection and play history and turn them to HTML via a ssg.Turns out that I don't need anything more than this.

But good luck!

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that's pretty doable for our mobile version, but I can't promise without doing some PoC fist But it would probably to this: - Scan the Barcode - Fetch the product name from it and try finding a match in our database (ManticoreSearch does a good job in finding matches with similar names) It all depends on if the product name would even be there at all, or if it can be retrieved easily

Since i don't have a Playstation console currently, can you tell me if disk games are also featured in your library? (E.g. other users may see them when they enter your profile) If they are, you could import them directly from our PSN integration.

Hmm the disc games don't show up in 'purchased' but do show up in 'played'.

Not sure what the api offers.

Of course, that only goes for discs that have been in the console at least once. Believe it or not, I have some still shrink wrapped.

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#27
post #6

Have you used Playnite? Have you built features / plan to make features that would set this apart from Playnite?

To be honest, we don't even have a desktop app currently, though we do plan to make one. IMO Playnite is a behemot and it's very hard to overtake it, so maybe the best course of action would be to create a plugin to help sync their library data with ours (?). We both use IGDB data so it shouldn't be too hard. They also have a more robust store sync system going for them. But feature wise, the main difference is that…

Hey, I'm actually in the process of building a desktop application that does this. Perhaps we could chat? I'm also leveraging IGDB. I have focused mainly on windows/Mac/Linux, with my main driver being steamdeck compatibility

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#28
post #25

I built mal for videogames too over 10 years ago. A friend also did individually. And I know at least 5 other sites that are "mal, but videogames" or have similar features. Imo the concept is a waste of time until there are APIs for each console/store to fetch user data and automate libraries. Most users don't bother and the few that do already have accounts spread on like 10 different sites for this kind of thing. P…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, we don't even have a desktop app currently, though we do plan to make one. IMO Playnite is a behemot and it's very hard to overtake it, so maybe the best course of action would be to create a plugin to help sync their library data with ours (?). We both use IGDB data so it shouldn't be too hard. They also have a more robust store sync system going for them. But feature wise, the main difference is that…

Hey, I'm actually in the process of building a desktop application that does this. Perhaps we could chat? I'm also leveraging IGDB. I have focused mainly on windows/Mac/Linux, with my main driver being steamdeck compatibility

Sure! Do you have Discord or anything similar?

Re: Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library

#30
post #6

Have you used Playnite? Have you built features / plan to make features that would set this apart from Playnite?

To be honest, we don't even have a desktop app currently, though we do plan to make one. IMO Playnite is a behemot and it's very hard to overtake it, so maybe the best course of action would be to create a plugin to help sync their library data with ours (?). We both use IGDB data so it shouldn't be too hard. They also have a more robust store sync system going for them. But feature wise, the main difference is that…

> IMO Playnite is a behemot and it's very hard to overtake it

Why do you need to overtake it? Playnite is open source, you could contribute to it to make it better.

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