Hiya, just newly thought about something: wouldn’t be nice if there was a simple way of checking what games you have played over the years, a way to keep track of wether you liked the game or not, how much time you spent playing it etc… Currently, personally i only check steam library for those kinda details. But it would be nice if there was a more dedicated solution for it, like a selfhosted app or something along those lines.
I’m not well educated regarding this so if there are any current solutions for this then please let me know, and let me know if you yourself have a special kind of system for this!
have a great rest of your weekend!
Your memory?
Reading comments of people who (hyper-) organize their games as if it’s a project to get through and they have to work off. And I’m sitting here just playing whatever the fuck I’m in the mood in.
If it’s Mario kart or balatro I’ve played it if not I haven’t.
I’ve been using backloggery.com for more than 15 years.
It’s a simple, manual site, but I think that’s also its main strenght - I’ve had too many issues with other sites where I wanted to add a niche game I played but it was not in their databases, inconsistent naming between games in the same series, no ability to add duplicates when I occasionally double-diped on a game and so on.
It has all features I need - you can add reviews, notes, track priorities, wishlist, borrowed games, make custom lists, get stats… it’s also community supported with no ads.
The site was a bit stale without development for a while, but Drumble (the owner) finished a major rewrite last year and started developing new features again. You can check his profile here for an example.
I’ve been using Launchbox, especially since I play emulator games. They’ve improved the efficiency of large libraries and added support for RetroAchievements, although I manually toggle completion status since I don’t always use it to launch my games so the time tracker isn’t accurate.
More importantly it let’s me hit randomize, so if I’m feeling adventurous it’ll pull a game from my backlog I might have got from anywhere.
I’ve started to use Playnite. It’s nice to have a complete catelog of all my games. Most of my real games (ie ignoring random freebies) are on steam, but I’ve collected a bunch elsewhere like gog, epic, humble bundle, and others. You can give it credentials and set up nearly all the major catelogs so that it can generate a listing of all games you own.
I use it to mark when I completed a game, but I’ve only had it for a couple years, so I generally go by memory or by steam statistics of hours played.
Downside is that it’s Windows only. It’s open source and free, and I still have a windows machine for most of my gpu games, but I mainly game on my steam deck or my Linux laptop these days, so I need to find another option or see if Playnite is wine/Proton compatible.
I’ve started rating games I finish, or didn’t like enough to finish, in backloggd.com
I do the same for movies and tv series on a different website, too.
Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?
If by remembering you mean “I use no tools to keep track of games I’ve played and make no special effort at remembering, either I do or I don’t”, then same. But also in the last few years I’ve been playing a lot less games than I used to (and I didn’t really play that many to start with).
No. I remember all the games I’ve played. I can’t list them all, however if you were to ask me “hey have you ever played xyz”, I would remember if I had or not.
Well, the point of such an app would be to have them listed I would guess.
I don’t. If I played a game and then forgot about it, then i get to play it again at a different stage in life. It’s a whole new experience! Why would I want to miss out on that?
There is nothing to miss out on by just keeping a list of which games you have played and when. It’s just an extra step after finishing playing a game.
Does steam recording the last launch date of a game ruin your next experience with a game for you ?
I use Obsidian to list the games.
I start using this 3-4years ago, there’s a lot of games on “Not started” or “On hold” there are games there I finished but want to replay and there’s a lot of older games that I played and didn’t add to “Done”. In my case is more of games that I bought it and need to be remembered to play it.
I do the same but use collections in steam, so I move the game when done, want to play, is playing and so on, and if I really hate/dislike the game then i will hide it.
Btw i saw you had Borderlands on hold did you see the user stats on the whole Frenchies? Big red text “overwhelming negativ”, most comments was about it being spy wear so maybe change that status to Nope with Genshin impact? I haven’t really looked into it tho saw it a moment ago.
I use Questlog and playlists to actually see what I’ve started/completed/paused/dropped and in which year happened
Wow! This is almost exactly what I had in mind! Thanks for sharing.
@pienoyer May I ask about the missing piece? (You said “almost”) 😁
Hello Mr Developer 😅 I couldn’t find the source code, it would be perfect if that was! Otherwise I can understand if u are keeping a closed hobby project.
It’s a cool open source project by a single dev, present on Mastodon and very receptive about feedbacks :)
Yeah checked it out last night, made an account and started logging! However I was not able to find the source code for this?
Uhm maybe my memory was at fault here about being OSS, better asking directly @[email protected]
@ItsMeAlex It’s not Open Source. Maybe at one time it will be but it wasn’t started as one and I don’t really have the capacity right now to maintain it as open source.
Thank you for the clarification! Then I correct myself, “it’s a cool free project backed by a single dev” :)
I find this post interesting. Are you asking because you’re curious about statistical information like “you played this game 28 hours more than that game” or just so you remember if you liked a game or not?
I understand the first one, but I can’t even comprehend the second. As soon as I see a screenshot from a game, my brain goes back to playing it and the general emotions it triggers. I might not remember the details about the game, but I’ll remember if it was fun, frustrating, boring etc. So I think it’s really strange that someone could completely forget playing a game.
I don’t mean any offense or anything. I know I’m some kind of neurodivergent, and I find the differences in how we each think very interesting.
All good dude! I was mostly wanting to keep an overview for myself so that I could:
- Rate the games I played
- Add notes/thoughts about the game
- See when I played the game and how long it took me to finish it. Those are the three main statistics im interested in. Of course, I generally remember if I have played a game or not, I just like keeping track of things in more detail :)
backloggery.com is your solution.
