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

gamenode.app

26 pointslamarcke40 comments

So, me (dev) and my friend (designer) have been building a website/mobile app to help users manage their game library (think MyAnimeList, but games) for a little over a year. We launched with a very basic set of features, and have been slowing expanding since then.

All the code is open source, and most of the things we implemented were direct feedback from users (e.g. being able to import games from Steam/PSN, and the Posts feature).

We don't show ads or have any kind of subscription. This is just a hobby project.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, as honestly the hardest part is getting people to actually try it out.

Link: https://gamenode.app You can also reach out to me via cassiolamarcksilvafreitas@gmail.com

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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 we're targetting all platforms instead of just PC. You could have GameNode in your phone when you only have a Xbox/PS console for example.

If you have any suggestions on what we may do to set us apart aside from this, please let me know

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?

> 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.

I meant that in a "we're building our own alternative" kind of way. That's why i said it makes more sense to contribute with a plugin for it.

why is the black background a 1.5MB JPG[1]? and it even has a responsive counterpart[2] that's half a megabyte for mobile. surely it could have just been `background: #000`? I didn't go looking for issues, I just noticed the image load in jaggedly (not progressively encoded) and couldn't believe my browser would do that for a solid color fill. did you use AI to make the website?

[1] https://gamenode.app/img/desktop-bg.png

[2] https://gamenode.app/img/mobile-bg.jpg

The background is not solid black. There is a very subtle background image that is most visible on the top right corner. The contrast is so low though that it's very hard to see.

It's actually not a solid color background, but a very low opacity collection of game covers.

The same goes for mobile, where if you look closely you will see Dishonored 2's cover.

And no, it's not AI generated. We started working on it before ChatGPT made it's debut (yeah i know it's not the first LLM but no one considered vibe coding before it), and you can see our entire source code in Github.

Okay, now that it's darker out I can see the game covers faintly. I guess I'd suggest making it a little brighter since it's hard to make out detail in daylight if you want it to come through, not a big deal if it looks how you want already

I also see it's actually a png on desktop and jpg on mobile. For an image of this size, I don't feel like png is a good fit without significant optimizations like restricting colors to a very limited palette. Baking the underlying background color into it as a jpg, like you did for mobile, could help reduce the file size quite a bit for a lot less effort. I converted them at 90% quality and ran them through ImageOptim which got the file size down to 115KB for the desktop image and 88KB for mobile

Sorry for the AI comment. I noticed Tailwind and NextJS while inspecting the images and jumped to conclusions

Oh, no prob. Thanks very much for the heads-up, by the way. I've made the changes locally and they will soon be in production too.

I open the website. Cookie banner does not have reject option. I close the website.

I click on the link - the website doesn't open.

Sorry, it's just there to say we use it, but we can't actually not store it since the only info we do store is your session's cookies (and only if you're logged in). We will look into adding it, but it won't do anything if you decide to login anyway :)

> the only info we do store is your session's cookies (and only if you're logged in).

If this truly is the only cookie you store, then you may not need the cookie banner, you can explain the cookie usage in your Privacy Policy.

For gdpr[1], strictly necessary cookies, like for login as you describe, do not require consent to be obtain as long as their usage is explained like in your privacy policy.

[1] https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

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...

No offense but it's not the barcode scanning that's the problem for this feature :)

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!

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.

Hmm i understand. I'm going to add this to our backlog and see how it can be done in the next weeks. Thanks!

Not sure if related, but I really enjoy Playnite: https://playnite.link/

Being able to manage my directory across Steam/Origin/Epic Games/Ubisoft, Amazon Games, etc.

As the data comes from igdb and igdb has a collection feature, is the import from steam/psn the main USP?

Does this do anything differently from https://backloggd.com/? I've been using Backloggd a lot over the past year and I'm not sure how this is different (aside from being ad-free, which is nice)

Backloggd is our main "competitor", and we know most people are already familiar with it. But going from their roadmap (https://backloggd.com/roadmap/), we already have: - A mobile app - Steam and PSN integration - A recommendations system - Social Page (?) not sure what they building, but we're trying to keep most of our stuff shareable. For example, you can share a nice Letterboxxed-style image of your game reviews. We're also close to shipping something like this for recent played games, similar to what these third party tools do for LastFM.

We both use IGDB as source, so there's no difference in the actual catalogue of games.

Repo link https://github.com/game-node-app

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!

Thanks! I understand where you're coming from, when we launched the first open beta we honestly didn't have any feature that we could use to argue "hey, you should use this instead!".

I personally think there's a overlap between people willing to manage their anime library, and people willing to manage their gaming library. Both have tons of options, and most will choose none.

But take MyAnimeList, for example: A mainly English-speaking audience, so we could assume most users are either using Crunchyroll/Netflix/Hulu, or the hundred possible options for piracy. But they still come back to update their profile in MAL every once in a while, despite all the options they have - and we have users which do exactly that too. We're trying our best to offer a solid management experience (e.g. mobile users may press and hold in any cover to manage a game, and desktop users have that directly at hover, and other QoL), and offer features on top of that. Our PSN and Steam integration are very recent, we only launched them ~8m in, and so is our mobile version. All of our users are basically early adopters, but they still log-in once or twice a week, and our only way of changing that is offering more reasons to stay online. That's why we're also building social-related stuff, like the Posts system, the reviews, and etc. We think users are way more likely to stay with us if they can interact with other people. This is kinda what Anilist is doing too.

Isn't Steam Library already doing this?

Steam can list/launch your non-Steam games, but it isn't open source. Listing non-steam games is also a manual process and there probably isn't any library art associated with the entry if it comes from Battle.net or whatever.

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.

Tbh my problem is not with launchers, I can live with separate launchers, but with having a full list of games I already bought on my phone when i'm digging through the console bargain bins.

At the least I have two copies of Mass Effect Andromeda and two of Valkyria Chronicles because they were very cheap and I forgot I already got them :)

Yes, same. When a deal pops up I have to check Steam, Epic, GoG, Humble, Itch, and so forth.

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...

Steam supports custom library art and there's a large community database of correctly-sized artwork covering many games: https://www.steamgriddb.com/

Yes but it's a pain.

99% of my games are on Steam though.

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