Slyko

The gaming bucket list that fills itself: share a TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or X post and AI adds the game. Or sync your Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Epic libraries. Then rate, compare with friends.

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Slyko: the bucket list built for how gamers actually play

Inspiration

Every week I open Letterboxd to log the films I've watched (a rating, a couple of lines, a look at what friends thought) or to add one I want to see. Doing that so regularly, I kept catching myself wanting the exact same thing for games. Somewhere to keep the ones I want to play, the ones I've played, what I made of each, and the numbers that come out of a few years of playing.

I've been carrying that idea for about two years. I always have a few app ideas running in parallel, and back then I committed to a different one: Deliceat, which is basically this same app but for food. You rate what a product tastes like, you wishlist the ones you still want to try, and you keep a log of your opinions. Same instinct, different domain. The gaming version stayed on the shelf but kept maturing in my head, and seeing Mr Lewis Blogs Gaming's Influencer Award in the Shipaton, a brief that describes almost exactly what I'd been sketching for two years, is what finally made me build it.

What it does

Slyko tracks your whole relationship with games: a wishlist for what's next, a collection of everything you've played, your ratings and reviews, and the stats that come out of it. The whole app is built so that keeping it up to date never turns into a chore.

  • Save straight from the post that sold you. Share a TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or X post into Slyko and it uses AI to figure out which game it is about, finds it, and adds it to your wishlist.
  • Save in the moment. Search the full IGDB catalogue (~350k titles) and add a game in one tap, or swipe through a discovery deck to beat the "I don't know what to play" freeze. Search also surfaces curated lists: this month's free games on PlayStation Plus, Game Pass and Epic, new releases, most anticipated, coming soon, trending, best of 2026 and top rated.
  • Your libraries, already there. Sync your Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Epic libraries, so your collection starts from reality instead of an empty list.
  • A library you actually want to open. Two honest states, To play and Played, not a five-tier taxonomy nobody maintains. Filter by status; sort the way you think.
  • Log what you played and what you thought. Mark a game played, score it, write a review, record the platform, hours played and completion. Every game you finish stays in your collection as a record, not just a checkmark. A community score emerges from everyone's ratings.
  • The whole game, not just the box. A game's page shows its DLCs, expansions and other editions, its latest news, and, for games that have one, its Steam Workshop: browse, sort, rate and find maps and mods without leaving the app.
  • Stats on your actual taste. Your collection becomes a profile: genre breakdown, hours logged, average rating, backlog completion rate, games finished 100%, favourite platform, total spent (and the month you buy the most), and the one game that's eaten the most of your hours. Pro members also get their achievements and trophies. A curated public Top 10 sits on top.
  • Social by default. Follow anyone, put your library and taste side by side with theirs, and get a feed of what the people you follow are playing, rating and reviewing.
  • Progress that feels good. You earn XP and levels for building out your collection and writing reviews, so keeping it up to date is a game in itself.

How I built it

  • Expo SDK 57 / React Native 0.86.
  • Native-first UI. A native iOS look and feel built on Liquid Glass, inspired by Apple's own Games app.
  • Supabase for the whole backend: auth, database, storage and edge functions.
  • IGDB API for the game catalogue; Steam Web API, PlayStation, Xbox and Epic for library sync.
  • Subscription catalogues (PlayStation Plus, Game Pass, Epic free games) refreshed on a schedule by a cron job.
  • AI game detection. A post shared into Slyko is run through an AI model that returns the game it shows, then matched against IGDB.
  • RevenueCat for the Pro tier and its paywall.
  • TanStack Query, Zustand, PostHog, AppsFlyer with ATT, Sentry, i18n.

Challenges I ran into

  • One IGDB rate limit for the entire app. 4 requests per second, per credential, and every user goes through my proxy. That single constraint shaped the whole data layer.
  • Every platform needed its own way in. Steam is the only one with a public, documented library API, and even it has gaps: the wishlist is effectively closed to anonymous access, and some fields (purchase price, last played) aren't returned for a third-party public profile. PlayStation, Xbox and Epic offer no public API at all, so each needed its own approach: an in-app sign-in for PlayStation and Epic, a gamertag lookup for Xbox.
  • iOS 27 landing mid-build. It changed how navigation headers render with Liquid Glass, so I had to adapt the headers across the app to the new system chrome.
  • App Store screenshot rejection. Apple rejected my first submission over game cover art and media shown in the store listing presentation images, which meant reworking the marketing assets around it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • AI that pulls a game out of a shared post. The single feature that makes "saw it on TikTok" turn into "it's on my list" without any typing.
  • Four platforms in one library. Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Epic games matched to IGDB and added with playtime, so the app is genuinely useful from the first session.
  • Steam Workshop inside a game tracker. As far as I know, no other tracker does it: for games with a Workshop, you can browse, sort and rate maps and mods from the game's page.
  • This month's free games, in one place. The PlayStation Plus and Epic monthly free games show up right in search, so there's no more hunting for them across different sites every month.
  • Every P0 and P1 task shipped in one month.
  • iOS-first plan, Android in the box anyway. It was scoped as iOS only; the wrapper-layer approach left enough time to bring Android along too.
  • A genuinely native-feeling iOS app in React Native. Real SwiftUI controls and Liquid Glass through @expo/ui, not a reskin.

What I learned

  • Sentry end to end.
  • IGDB's API.
  • How each console platform works, and what it takes to bring its library into an app.
  • Building a paywall with AI. RevenueCat's AI paywall generation is a recent addition; I used it to get from a rough idea to a working, editable paywall without laying out every state by hand.
  • Shipping an AI feature inside the app. Turning a shared post into the right game is a fuzzy matching problem: getting the prompt, the fallbacks and the reconciliation with IGDB reliable was its own piece of work.

What's next

The priority now is the app that already exists:

  • Stabilise the app on real usage.
  • Market Slyko to bring in real users, and use their feedback to refine what's already there before building anything new.

After that, a list of ideas I'm weighing, to be shaped by that feedback:

  • A play-session timer you start when you sit down to play, so playtime is tracked automatically, with day-by-day and streak stats on top of it.
  • A "what should I play tonight" picker that narrows your backlog by the time you actually have and the mood you're in.
  • A "how big is my backlog" figure: IGDB knows roughly how long each game takes to finish, so I can add those up across your "to play" list and show how many hours the pile really is.
  • Offline-first: browse and update your list without a connection, synced as soon as you're back online.
  • More platforms: Nintendo first, then whichever ones users ask for.
  • An annual recap, Spotify Wrapped style.
  • An alert when a wishlisted game releases, and price alerts on a game you want to buy.
  • A web version.
  • Alternate app icons.
  • Maybe a light mode.

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Updates

posted an update —

From "What's next" to shipped: Slyko is now on the web

The web version was in my "What's next" section. It's live today at slyko.app: your whole Slyko library on the big screen, with the same data as the app.

What's on the web

  • Everything you use every day: home, collection, search with the editorial and subscription rails (PS Plus, Game Pass, Epic), game pages, rating and reviews, Top 10, profiles, friends, journal, notifications, leaderboard, stats and XP.
  • Steam Workshop too: browse a game's mods, then add, rate and review them, just like in the app.
  • Sign in with Google or Apple. App users link their account in the app settings, then find all their data on the web.
  • Pro stays in the app. Subscriptions and library imports are handled in the app, and the web sends people there with a clear call to action.

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Submission history