Has anyone been able to login to this site?

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.

Then I just tried a moment ago and it worked on the first try. Guess they fixed the bug..

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.

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!

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

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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 ..

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.

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.

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.