Yesterday I wrote briefly about new gaming startup Raptr, formerly called GXL, Inc. Founder (and celebrity gamer) Dennis Fong has now demo’d the product on stage at GDC, and I’ve had the chance to see the product myself.
Approximately 100 people are currently in the beta, all friends and family to the Raptr team. Today the company is taking signups for new beta users on their home page, and will be letting a couple of thousand new users in shortly. A full launch is expected in a couple of months.
As I mentioned yesterday, Raptr has two components. A Windows based software download that keeps games up to date automatically, and a website social network that pulls game data in from the client as well. The product is similar to Valve-only Steam, although it has a lot more to offer users and is developer agnostic. Today, Raptr supports 1,000 titles, including World of Warcraft - Steam has a hundred or so.
The website is a game-centric social network. Users add friends and can see what games they are playing, installing, updating, uninstalling, etc. You can also see what games your friends are playing right now.
Raptr looks at the games you play, and how much time you spend, and compares that data to other players to recommend other games to you that you might like.
More Screen shots below:
See all
Post
As a side note, Steam is far from being Valve only… It has a lot of small indie publishers on it, plus games from several major publishers/developers.
James, what are the social components like on Steam? How doe the actual products seem to compare?
How is this different from xfire?
http://www.xfire.com/
No invite code given?
@ Christopher
It’s different because of the client that manages your updates as well as the recommendation engine.
Um cant even sign up, click the sign up button and nothing happens.
Yet if you input invalid data though it says please enter valid data.
Tried in IE 7, FF 2.0.0.12, and Opera 9.
@Will:
Did you try entering a password? If so, then it won’t work unless you have an invite code. So just enter your name and email. They’ll then send out an invitation along with a password (presumably, since you didn’t create one).
I had the same thing as well, until i noticed the password. Also, the confirmation is kinda vague, as it is a very small message that comes up on the top, where you don’t expect it to be. But just click once, look up and voila, it should be there.
Steam currently has over 250 games and over 20 tools (servers, map editors, SDKs, etc.). They have 15 million subscribers, and any user can log into their Steam account from a internet connected computer, and download all of the games that they paid for.
Valve will work with any developer to integrate their game into Steam, so they are as developer agnostic as any developer wants. Will Raptr offer development/integration tools like Valve’s Steamworks? Can I sell games through Raptr as seamlessly as Steam allows? Does Raptr offer DRM to protect my game assets?
From a development point of view, my initial concern (keeping in mind that I have yet to get an invite, and can’t examine Raptr first hand) is can I choose to not have Raptr handle patches? In theory, it is interesting to see Raptr supporting 1000 titles, but are they doing this with the cooperation of the game developers? Or is their software being intrusive on the game code (like Xfire’s chat system)?
From a end user’s point of view, Raptr sounds interesting if they let me opt out of supplying my game interaction data. From their Privacy Policy, I noted the following with some concern:
“We will also share statistical and demographic information about our users and their use of the Raptr Features with suppliers of advertisements and programming.”
So, they were supposed to announce a round of funding? Is that why this got mentioned on Techcrunch or was it because they were part of the start up presentation sponsored by Charles River Ventures. If thats the case, let’s hear more about Twofish who was also presenting.
Also, where is your coverage of GameStrata - http://www.gamestrata.com?
http://www.raptr.com is not working
sites down.. lol
did they pay for the review? two posts in one week about same site. and its not google, yahoo or facebook.
Looks nice. There are many communities for serious gamers on the web but it looks interesting.
I think sometimes people are caught in the traditional definition of a gamer and tailor their offerings to someone who spends $50 on a game or plays world of warcraft. There are more people who play a quick 5 to 10 minute game on the web a few times a day, even spend 20 mins a day or a puzzle, word or a strategy game that they bought for $20. At gameseekr( http://www.gameseekr.com) we are trying to reach that audience.
But its good to see our gaming friends get some well deserved attention.
Good luck raptr.
auditing - you win a ferrari in a quake tournament and I’ll write about your startup twice, too.
I don’t remember Steam having a social core at all. And from what I can remember I hated the steps needed to get into my games when playing through steam. They seamed to lag the games a bit for me. X-Fire would let me chat with people while in separate games and let me jump right to there game and server with a click of the mouse. The only down fall to X-Fire was the tracking of game time. I had to remember to log out so the wife wouldn’t come in moan that I had 8hrs played that week. hehe
Steam has a social component, added several updates ago, and just recently, they enhanced it even more. You have friends, you can join groups, your stats and achievements are tracked, etc
How about something more recent Michael, than Thresh a.k.a. Dennis Fong and his ferrari. Look at Fnatic (professional gaming team http://www.fnatic.com), we have had countless winners most noteable was Sander “Vo0″ Kaasjager who won over $235,000 during the CPL World Tour in 2005, which was featured on MTV. He lost the final to Jonathon “fatal1ty” Wendal but still picked up 100,000 in that one game alone. Go view view the 5 min clip. http://video.google.com/videop.....7312388487
My point here is Dennis is using his ferrari winning fame to get publicity, but the fact of the matter is I have been running the world number 1 proffessional gaming team for 3 years and I’m sure i have a closer relationship to gamers than Mr Fong :D. However he had a 102 million exit so fair play to him, he deserves a lot of respect.
Also you have done a good write up of our site already http://www.UGAME.net which is a competitor to raptr.com.
http://www. i-guide .ro
check out our new updates
http://www. i-guide .ro
is it just me or is Raptr a huge marketing portal?
10% of our customers play WoW 16 hours a day, 15% play TF2 3 hour a day, etc etc
They are obviously in a great position to sell the gaming playing behaviour of their users.
What’s worse is that you even have to install spyware onto your desktop fr them to probe your harddrive.
If you have any semblance of privacy at all please don’t use services like these.
I’ll give it a try, but I see little reason to switch over from Xfire. Not only is Xfire a mini-desktop app, it’s got a social networking feel on the website side.
Why you are against Microsoft in every dam* article you type ?
Can Open-Source Developers “Finally” Trust Microsoft?
• ( ) No, Never Trust the Beast From Redmond
• ( ) Maybe, It Still Has A Long Way To Go
• ( ) Yes, If It Follows Through On Its New Interoperability Promises
…
Lick my bloddy thing man .. comeon it’s a competetion isn’t and everyone has his own speciality in the market .. Don’t fool people buddy .. it’s too late .. TechCrunch fully paid by world wide business that works on smashing Microsoft picture in the market ..
I own an internet cafe and I’m very excited to see how this develops.
Hopefully Raptr will be smart about the possible mass market that internet cafes world wide serve. If business owners like myself were able to remotely manage all the updates for our computers I would be more than willing to dish out licensing fees for the convenience.
Imaging a dozen computers at once is extremely cumbersome when hardware profiles vary and to my knowledge there is no remote upgrade management tool available for multiple programs or games. This has great potential.
Show us what you can do, Raptr!
Michael -
A couple people did mention but Steam does have a social platform within it. It’s not particularly extensive but it’s there. They fairly recently added a profile page and the ability to create community type pages (groups).
Since launch however it’s had internal messaging (basically an IM client) and you’ve always been able to create a friend’s list and see where they are playing and such. The one advantage to the Steam IM client is that it actually works in game (basically removing the need for XFire as long as the game you’re playing is part of Steam and your friends are all on it). The IM client I think is the biggest advantage to the platform, as generally anything but XFire will cause issues. Many games have problems with Alt+Tab in general or at the very least can’t do it quickly enough for an action game.
The other big issues are one’s Jim outlined already.
Mr Coffee, yes I made that mistake too the first time. I tired on 3 different computers and same result.
Then I just tried a moment ago and it worked on the first try. Guess they fixed the bug..
The comparison to Steam is inappropriate. These are two completely different animals.
Steam is a full blown digital delivery system that stores your purchased content and allows a reinstall when you are at a new computer. Steam also patches your purchased games, provides demos has instant messaging and other social features. Steam is also a pivotal answer in the pc-gaming war against piracy, which is killing the non-mmo, non-casual PC games business. PC Game developers can no longer get decent funding for PC based games - but that is another story all together, albeit related to this issue.
Raptr is a patch delivery system. There are many patch delivery systems (gameshadow.com, gamespy arcade, er.. komrade, etc) You still have to go, buy and install your games from a cd-based retailer, or in some cases online download for c-class or aging titles that no longer have retail support. There is no backend digital delivery system. There is no DRM. There is no anti-piracy system. This is a clever marketing system with some useful social features.
I think Raptr has an interesting future but don’t compare it to Steam until it is delivering full AAA games with a drm system and enabling your digital game locker.
List of games? I’m curious if anyone has gotten into the website and can put a list of the supported games online somewhere. The raptr website currently only shows the dashboard summary when I visit.
I’m actually looking forward to this. When can I get an invite?
tfkkft tfkkft
I signed up and got an invite code, but it doesn’t work. The link in the page sends you to http://preview.raptr.com:8080/ but that page won’t respond. When I try to enter the invite code into the form, it tells me it isn’t valid.
Has anyone been able to login to this site?
i have the same problem, gj raptr…..