Ever feel like there are just too many places to play video games? There’s Steam, Xbox Game Pass, Nintendo Switch, the Epic Games Store, and that’s where we’ll end the list because it could take up a paragraph all on its🎉 own if it kept going. By the nature of the industry, we gamers use dozens of different services to play, all depending on what you’re in the mood for. Exclusive games only make the problem worse. You might openly weep while looking at your Xbox gamerscore, knowing yo♏u don’t suck that badly - you just happen to also play on Nintendo Switch.
“Most people aren’t dedicated to o🌜ne platform,” Charles Watson, creator of , tells me. “They usually have some kind of console and then a handheld or something. It&rs🍎quo;s always hard when your stuff is fragmented between different things, like your Xbox Achievements and your PlayStation Trophies and all that.”
Ente♛r: Watson’s website. The site (also available in app form) 🅰allows users to keep track of what games they want to play, are playing, and have played.
Watson, who has nine years experience of software development, was inspired to create a video game tracker when he returned to the video game sphere after a d♛ecade-long hiatus.
“I started listening to different gaming podcasts,” Watson says. “And there were just so many recommendations com💃ing in. Having used Goodreads and Letterboxd, I wanted something to track all of the recommendations I was getting. So, I made one.”
Despite being inspired by sites like Goodreads, Watson knew there were a few things he𝔉 didn’t want to take from them. “I’ve really tried to avoid [cluttering GG], but it’s starting to get hard because there’s a lot of features that I want to add but will require adding more things to the game pages.”
GG includes the ability to add games to your collection and sor🌌t them under Play Statuses, such as Want To Play, Playing, Shelved, Beaten, Abandoned, and Completed. Users can also make their own lists to sort their collection of games. For individua𝓀l games, players rate their experience out of 5 stars and write their own reviews, making it a similar user experience to Letterboxd. However, where Letterboxd offers a deep dive into the crew, production, and everything associated with any given movie, GG keeps the focus squarely on the games.
“I really wanted to highlight the game itself and not the metadata,” Watson says. “I just wanted to focus on the art instead of who the developer is and when it was released and all that kind of s🍸tuff. I still want to [include those details], but that’s not my main focus.”
However, a desire for simplicity won’t stop Watson from adding new features to GG. He uses to showcase what he’s already improved on the site, what he’s working on adding, and what his users want him to include. Watson also says he was working on a feature that would allow users to upload their own ꦕscreenshots from games, one that would automatically import their achievements from places like Xbox and Steam, and one where they could track their playthrough dates and include notes as they played.
Watson said he doesn’t do any formal advertising, so most of his users find GG through word of mouth. There is a discord server for hi🐈s users to engage on, and he said that his favourite thing about making the site was the community that has developed.
“We’ve got tons of people on Discord,” Watson says, adding that many have told him “it’s one of the best communities that they’ve ever been in… [It’s] humbling, ‘cause I&rsღquo;m just making a gaming site. This is pretty much the only gaming community that I’m a part of, so I don’t really know what the other ones are like. But having so many people say that is good to know.”