gsabater / Steam-Backlog

Steam Backlog is a free tool to manage your Steam library
https://steam-backlog.com
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Support for non-Steam platforms #72

Open dragonshardz opened 5 years ago

dragonshardz commented 5 years ago

This is probably the best of the various backlog-management tools out there, but is it possible (and practical) for support for other platforms as well? Not only Origin, battle.net, etc. but also manually added games.

gsabater commented 5 years ago

Hello @dragonshardz, thanks for your kind words.

About having multiple sources of games, we have been studying to add them, but is not as easy as it sounds.

First, game data is scraped automatically from steam. Each store has different apis and store data. And adapting our scrapers to each source is a manual process. Otherwise game data would need to be added manually and we can't do it.

Second, game images come directly from steam CDNs, that means that we don't host any game images or posters. If we had to host the images, that would mean more hosting space at a cost, and reduced loading speeds. Their CDN is insanely good.

Third. Users libraries are updated automatically from steam each day. Having more sources mean that users had to update their libraries manually. Some users might be ok with this, but not everyone likes that.

Fourth, game conflicts. When a game is in steam and maybe gog or even manual, we need to be sure to merge the games and not end with hundreds of duplicates.

And last, filters. Now users can sort and filter games with multiple criteria. If for example GOG don't specify that a game has controller support, we can't display that game in the search results when you search for games with controller. This is a big deal because game search would be inaccurate.

So, while this is not impossible, it's very unlikely to happen. GOG is the store that has more numbers to be the next source of games.

Salut

dragonshardz commented 5 years ago

I think most people could wait on manually adding games, but expanding to more services (like GOG or Origin) would be super cool.

gsabater commented 5 years ago

You are probably right, we'd love to expand the site to GOG, and by doing it we can understand better the implications of including more game sources.

As a reminder for myself, I will leave here a checklist of things I have to check when I take a look at this in a couple of months.