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I don't think this has any chance of competing with Steam. Though it may offer a more polished experience, it requires much more effort to use. Why would a ga

I don't think this has any chance of competing with Steam. Though it may offer a more polished experience, it requires much more effort to use. Why would a gamer manually type in what they're playing when Steam automatically broadcasts that to their friends?

bigtunacan 13y ago
What about all of the games you aren't playing on Steam?
- blueblob 13y ago
  Xfire[1] also automatically detects the game you are playing. [1] http://www.xfire.com/ http://www.xfire.com/
- JD557 13y ago
  You can add non-steam games to steam. I'm not sure if it tracks your playtime though (I think it does)
  - vittore 13y ago
    I think it says "playing other games"
    - eropple 13y ago
      No, it says "Playing non-Steam game" with the name of it below. Which you can overload for your own amusement. When on my Windows machine, Steam friends see me playing Visual Studio 2013.
      - iamdave 13y ago
        Ha I did this once with Outlook except I changed the icon and the shortcut name to Half Life 3 Beta. People on my friends list were freak. Ing. OUT
- eropple 13y ago
  The only game I have played in the last year that wasn't on Steam is Minecraft, which I launch via Steam and get the Steam overlay. I too don't see the point of this. Gaming has expanded to the point where "a social network for gamers" is called "Facebook" or "Twitter." "A social network for core gamers" is called "Steam", and as it happens they are also printing money and making little money hats with the money they printed because holy shit that's a lot of money.
  - AdrianRossouw 13y ago
    I don't see minecraft mentioned here often, but sweet jesus the mods that have come out of that game are mindbendingly cool. You can spend weeks strip mining randomly generated alternate universes and pumping their oceans of lava/oil through liquid tesseracts to power your base while you gather enough uranium and other resources to eventually put together a full scale nuclear reactor. There are fully featured computers in the game with embedded lua interpreters and wireless networking so you can do stuff like build distributed power station monitoring software. There are also programmable drones called turtles, that can even be built to be self replicating. There are blocks that mimic quantum properties that you can even use to do quantum teleportation between multiple servers.
philtar 13y ago
So steam is good, right? Maybe, this is the social network aspect of steam, but for Playstation, Xbox, Wii etc. I'm getting really tired of all this pessimism on HN. I wish pg would institute the "if you don't have anything nice to say stfu" rule.
- RussianCow 13y ago
  This is constructive criticism, not pessimism. If a product posted on HN is totally worthless, should we all just be optimistic about it and praise it anyway? (Not saying DPADD is worthless, just using an analogy.)
- eropple 13y ago
  You confuse criticism of design for pessimism. I don't think it's for consoles; if it is intended for them, who's going to let them on their platform? What console manufacturers are going to let them into the hooks that PSN/Xbox Live reserve for themselves? It is in consoles' best interest not to allow cross-anything that they don't have to, and if it isn't in the system they're playing games on, its reason for existence is murky.
saraid216 13y ago
Incidentally, the Steam API seems to let you pull that information. (I never really got a handle on the API myself, but I was just using it to find games that everyone in my group owned.)

bigtunacan 13y ago

What about all of the games you aren't playing on Steam?

blueblob 13y ago
Xfire[1] also automatically detects the game you are playing. [1] http://www.xfire.com/ http://www.xfire.com/
JD557 13y ago
You can add non-steam games to steam. I'm not sure if it tracks your playtime though (I think it does)
- vittore 13y ago
  I think it says "playing other games"
  - eropple 13y ago
    No, it says "Playing non-Steam game" with the name of it below. Which you can overload for your own amusement. When on my Windows machine, Steam friends see me playing Visual Studio 2013.
    - iamdave 13y ago
      Ha I did this once with Outlook except I changed the icon and the shortcut name to Half Life 3 Beta. People on my friends list were freak. Ing. OUT
eropple 13y ago
The only game I have played in the last year that wasn't on Steam is Minecraft, which I launch via Steam and get the Steam overlay. I too don't see the point of this. Gaming has expanded to the point where "a social network for gamers" is called "Facebook" or "Twitter." "A social network for core gamers" is called "Steam", and as it happens they are also printing money and making little money hats with the money they printed because holy shit that's a lot of money.
- AdrianRossouw 13y ago
  I don't see minecraft mentioned here often, but sweet jesus the mods that have come out of that game are mindbendingly cool. You can spend weeks strip mining randomly generated alternate universes and pumping their oceans of lava/oil through liquid tesseracts to power your base while you gather enough uranium and other resources to eventually put together a full scale nuclear reactor. There are fully featured computers in the game with embedded lua interpreters and wireless networking so you can do stuff like build distributed power station monitoring software. There are also programmable drones called turtles, that can even be built to be self replicating. There are blocks that mimic quantum properties that you can even use to do quantum teleportation between multiple servers.

philtar 13y ago

So steam is good, right? Maybe, this is the social network aspect of steam, but for Playstation, Xbox, Wii etc. I'm getting really tired of all this pessimism on HN. I wish pg would institute the "if you don't have anything nice to say stfu" rule.

RussianCow 13y ago
This is constructive criticism, not pessimism. If a product posted on HN is totally worthless, should we all just be optimistic about it and praise it anyway? (Not saying DPADD is worthless, just using an analogy.)
eropple 13y ago
You confuse criticism of design for pessimism. I don't think it's for consoles; if it is intended for them, who's going to let them on their platform? What console manufacturers are going to let them into the hooks that PSN/Xbox Live reserve for themselves? It is in consoles' best interest not to allow cross-anything that they don't have to, and if it isn't in the system they're playing games on, its reason for existence is murky.

saraid216 13y ago

Incidentally, the Steam API seems to let you pull that information. (I never really got a handle on the API myself, but I was just using it to find games that everyone in my group owned.)