Games We Might Never Play

The pile: every game you meant to play, with its cover and how long it takes to beat.
Games We Might Never Play app icon
Finish a game and it ends on a card you can share: cover, score and its place on your shelf.

Inspiration

Every gamer has the same problem and nobody has a good place to put it. A friend sends a trailer. A YouTube video makes something look incredible. A Steam sale happens. All of it goes into a mental list that does not exist, and six months later you cannot remember the name of the thing you wanted to play.

Existing backlog trackers make you go to the app and search. That is exactly the moment the intention dies. The game gets discovered somewhere else, on a link, in a chat, halfway down a feed.

What it does

Share a link into it from anywhere. A Steam URL, a YouTube or TikTok video, or any page with a title. It works out which game you meant, matched against IGDB, and one tap drops it in your pile. You can paste text or type a name too.

Every game sits in one of four places: on the pile, playing, finished or shelved. When you cannot choose, Tonight shuffles your pile and deals you one game, and you can ask for something short. The Shelf holds what you have finished.

When you finish something, it does not just get a tick. It runs a head to head ranking against the games you have already finished, so your shelf becomes an ordered list of what you actually thought was better, best first. Not five stars, which everyone gives a 4 to. A real ordering, built one comparison at a time.

Then there are crews. Friends you share a pile with, so the recommendation lands in the place you already keep the list.

Finishing a game ends on a card you can share: the cover, your score and its place on your shelf. A month card does the same for your whole month.

Three looks ship: Night Arcade, The Den and Memory Card. A dragon mascot has his own moods, from napping to celebrating, and on a crew's page he grows a head for each member, up to four.

Also in the app now:

Bring your whole library in. Sign in on Steam, GOG, Epic, Xbox or PlayStation's own page and your games land on the pile. It only ever adds. You can also scan the barcode on a box.

Watch it add up. A timer logs your sessions, and your stats show what you played and finished.

Organize it your way. Named shelves, a short note on any game, which platforms you own it on and what you paid, and your own score out of 10.

Know when to buy. Set a price on a Steam game and the app tells you when it drops below it.

Never miss a release. Get a reminder the day a saved game comes out, and a home screen widget shows what is coming next.

No account needed. Sign in only if you want crews, your pile synced across phones, or a public shelf. You can save your pile to a file and bring it back any time.

New in 1.15.0 on Google Play (29 Sep):

Free this week. See the games Epic is giving away now and next, and what just landed on Game Pass, and save any of them to your pile. A reminder can tell you when they change.

Public shelf. Sign in, switch it on, and share one link anyone can open: your pile, what you are playing, and your ranked finishes.

Everything is free. No Pro version, no paywall, no ads, and no limit on your pile. The optional tips unlock nothing.

How we built it

React Native and Expo with TypeScript. Zustand for state, Supabase for accounts and crews, IGDB as the canonical game identity so two people saving the same game are saving the same row. Small Cloudflare Workers serve the free games list and the public shelf pages.

The share flow is the interesting piece: an Android and iOS share target that takes whatever the OS hands it, then resolves a title out of a Steam URL, a video page or an og:title, and matches it to IGDB.

RevenueCat carries four supporter tiers. They unlock nothing, which is deliberate.

Challenges we ran into

Resolving "a link someone shared" into "a specific game" is much harder than it sounds. A TikTok URL contains no game name. A YouTube title contains the game name buried in clickbait. A Steam URL is clean but is one format among many. So the resolver shows its best matches and never saves a guess by itself. If nothing matches, it asks you to type the name, because a wrong game in your pile is worse than no game.

The other hard problem was ranking. Asking someone to rank twenty finished games is a chore. Asking them one comparison at a time, right after they finish something, is a moment they are already thinking about it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The supporter tiers gate nothing. Not one feature. They are a tip, and the app is complete without them. Four tiers at $1.99 through $19.99, and every one of them buys exactly the same app.

We became an IGDB data partner. Twitch, which runs IGDB, signed a commercial data license with us on 14 September. It unlocked the data dumps that only partners get, and the app now searches its own copy of IGDB's catalogue: 315,081 games.

And the ranking. It turns a backlog app, which is a list of guilt, into a record of what you actually enjoyed.

What we learned

Capture has to happen where discovery happens. The moment you make someone open your app and search, you have lost. Every feature that matters here is downstream of the share sheet.