Steam vs Evolve vs Overwolf vs Xfire vs Desura

[trjp]

It's games library contains all the big releases, MMOs, F2Ps, DOTAs and a lot of 'classic' titles - but it's woefully poor when it comes to Indie stuff. Even those super-popular Indie games, the ones which sell a tonne in every Steam Sale/Bundle, are missing in many cases (in fact more than half the games I launched in the 3-4 days I had it went unrecognised).

I can add games to my own local DB (as well as submitting them) but it won't 'track' them until they accept the submission which defeats the point of me doing it somewhat (esp as they clearly don't intend to do much work accepting submissions).

I didn't really get far beyond that tbh - if I'm going to have to hack-in half my games and not have them tracked, there's little point in me using it.

That said, Raptr aren't a lot better at the 'adding new games' thing. It boggles my mind tbh, surely the trick is to support every possible game (allowing users to add their own, even)??

[ColOfNature]

You're right that they don't track a huge number of games, but they are still in beta and they're only a 3 or 4 (or thereabouts) man dev team. And while they haven't added any games for a while, they've recently streamlined the submission system so it should pick up.

[Odeon]

I tried XFire a while back too and like the potential of the features it provides, but it doesn't work for the game I play nearly exclusively, AfterWorld. It's an MMO, but it's a lesser-known indie one produced by a handful of devs, so I'm not surprised that it's not supported yet, but I gave up waiting for that to happen.

I thought about looking it up on Evolve, Raptr, and the others, but with its size and the near total lack of advertisement, I'm all but 100% sure that it's not supported by any of them. Once its out of beta testing, I'll try again though because the devs are supposed to be putting more effort into marketing at that point.

[Bobtree]

Xfire's best feature is the persistent chatrooms with hosted voice servers (player voice hosting works ok too, and it can optionally auto select the host). The voice quality and volume detection thresholding are great (Steam needs this badly), and players can leave and rejoin without resending invites. You get to see who's on, who's in the chat, who's on voice, and whether they've launched an Xfire supported game (for some games it supports joining on servers that friends are connected to). I like having my game-time tracked, but they don't reliably add new games fast enough, so the stats often under-report.

The very big downside is that Xfire development has apparently been on life support since the big buyout.

I recently had trouble with the repeating UAC prompts when setting Xfire up on Win7-64, so now I have it running via the task scheduler with admin permissions on login. Typical users are not going to figure this stuff out.

I wrote the following in the last RPS Evolve article comments: Xfire has had some bad snafu’s lately. It now prevents some GFWL games from logging in (see http://www.xfire.com/forums/182686/topic/1402288/), and the Xfire in-game overlay does not stay globally disabled when it is restarted (the option is ignored until you re&un-toggle it again), so I have to manually disable in-game for every game to prevent it from running (because I use D3Doverrider to force triple-buffering and a conflict with the Xfire overlay will crash games).

The next big screwup may be what sends us to an alternative like Evolve.

I'd love to be able to import play-time stats from Xfire and Steam. That stuff is hard to leave behind, even though you don't need/use it for anything. Like old saved games for titles you completed, it represents a time investment.

[Dashiva]

I'd love to be able to import play-time stats from Xfire and Steam. That stuff is hard to leave behind, even though you don't need/use it for anything. Like old saved games for titles you completed, it represents a time investment.

Raptr does allow you to import your steam play time stats. Xfire unfortunately you cannot import tho.

[DigitalSignalX]

Raptr does allow you to import your steam play time stats. Xfire unfortunately you cannot import tho.

When evolve installed it asked for my steam credentials, it might import times as well as library - I couldn't say for sure as I use steam mostly for free stuff and shopping.

[ColOfNature]

Evolve imports your play time and achievements from Steam if you link accounts.

[trjp]

One thing worth nothing on the 'time played' thing in Steam is that it's utter nonsense and bears no relation to reality in any way :)

When I had Raptr installed alongside Steam they would vary ENORMOUSLY in terms of how long I'd played some games - and games's own timers are often vastly different to Steam's times too.

What Evolve did track, it seemed to do quite accurately tho - it's actually quite a hard thing to do well (do you include pause time, menu time, loadout choosing time etc. - a game can be selective but Steam/Evolve etc. cannot).

[mamu]

It's games library contains all the big releases, MMOs, F2Ps, DOTAs and a lot of 'classic' titles - but it's woefully poor when it comes to Indie stuff. Even those super-popular Indie games, the ones which sell a tonne in every Steam Sale/Bundle, are missing in many cases (in fact more than half the games I launched in the 3-4 days I had it went unrecognised).

So colR could confirm this at some point, but I'm one of the developers of Evolve (just realized there was a forum thread over this way when checking our referrer logs) and I'd like to address some of your concerns. We're definitely less popular than Raptr, Xfire, and Overwolf--we're also a sort of three dudes in a garage type operation interested in building the gaming service and tool we've always wanted.

I'd like to say we do a pretty good job tracking indie games--we have several hundred supported currently, but if there are any big ones we're missing, please let us know! As is noted above, we've streamlined submissions a bunch lately. We're able to add 10-20 games a day now instead of 10-20 a month. And unlike before, it's now 99% powered by users rather than hamstringed by our lack of time as we develop features. As an example, Dear Esther's remake just hit Steam and we had support for it a bit less than 24 hours afterward.

The restart you experienced when installing Evolve usually only happens if you happen to be on a laptop or use PS/2 input devices on a desktop. It has to do with how we capture input for our overlay--we use filter drivers, which tend to be quite a bit more robust and rarely suffer from bleedthrough issues that have plagued overlays like Xfire's for a long time. We're aware it's not ideal, although it doesn't impact the majority of our users as far as we know. We're always trying to think of better ways to streamline the install process to make it easier.

Regarding play time importing-- we don't currently import from Steam although we'd like to (we keep imported hours separate), and we have imported from Xfire in the past although they seem to like to play games with data lock in.

One of the advantages of being tiny is that we do still try directly respond to complaints and factor in changes based on them as much as possible. It obviously is getting a bit harder as we add more users, but we hope to continue doing so for a long time to come.