Raptr is Dead as of September 30

Last month I asked if Raptr was dead.  Now it seems that I asked the question close to the point where there would be no doubt.

I peeked over at the site today and found a notification on the main page with a link to a press release.

The press release announced the end of the service.

September 1, 2017

Today we are announcing that we will be shutting down Raptr on September 30, 2017.  The world is different today than when we first launched Raptr.  Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD all have their own game optimization tools now and they do a fine job.  So it’s time for us to get out of the way.

We are sad to say goodbye to Raptr. Many of you have invested a lot of time on Raptr so if you’d like to export your tracked gameplay data, follow the instructions below:

  • Go to Raptr.com
  • Sign in to your Raptr account
  • Once you are signed in, click here to get your gameplay data.

If you have any other questions, please send us feedback.

We are proud of the service we built and the community who helped grow Raptr to be used by millions of gamers worldwide.  Thank you for your support for the past 10 years.

Dennis “Thresh” Fong
Co-founder and CEO

It is nice that you can get a JSON file with your play time records in it.  Not sure what I will do with that, but I can sock it away in a directory to rediscover some day.

Here at the end of the service, my final top five games ranked by play time tracked are:

  1. World of Warcraft
  2. EVE Online
  3. Minecraft
  4. Rift
  5. Lord of the Rings Online

And so it goes.  You can look at the site for the remainder of the month.  After that it is likely to be some sort of link ad site and all that will be left is a Wikipedia entry and whatever the Internet Archive saved off.  Gamer social networks are not a viable business.

Addendum: Raptr sent out an email update about its shut down which was pretty much identical to the quote above, but which also included this tidbit:

Note: If you are a Plays.tv user, we want you to know Plays.tv launched as an independent company in January 2017 and is not affected by Raptr’s shutting down.

So I guess we know what Thresh is up to; trying to make Plays.tv a thing.

3 thoughts on “Raptr is Dead as of September 30”

  1. Aywren Sojourner

    I’m sorry to hear this, but not entirely surprised. I used Raptr back when it was just a tracking application. I was hoping to capture play time across all of my games, not just Steam games. This worked well for MMOs, and I was happy with it.

    Until they started shoving social media into the equation. I didn’t want forced chat that I couldn’t be invisible on, or friends lists, or especially the forced integration of video recording/streaming that just did its own thing automatically. I had to hunt that down and kill that fast.

    Eventually, I cleaned everyone off that friends list because I didn’t like not being able to go invisible or opt out of people seeing when I was online and what I was playing (I’m a private person). Since Raptr was one of the few apps I allowed to run at computer startup (in order to capture stats), it felt very invasive to me. But I still wanted the tracking part of the app!

    Over time, I gave up the tracking entirely. The app felt bloated and I started to wonder if it was effecting gaming performance. So I deleted Raptr and parted ways. If they hadn’t forced a bunch of features I never wanted, I’d still be using it for tracking. But they never gave that option. I don’t know if they changed that eventually, but it was too little too late for me.

    The lesson is, don’t assume everyone wants to participate in this overly connected social media movement. I want to pick and choose what other people know about me, including when I’m online and what games I’m playing. If I can’t turn it off, I just won’t use your thing.

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  2. pkudude99

    My story is similar to Aywren’s – I wanted to track game time and nothing else, so as they adding more and more (IMO) bloat to it, it became less and less useful to me. I had my cooling go out about… year and a half ago, maybe 2 years now, and had to get a new drive and video card, as well as a new cooling system, so when it came time to reinstall stuff, I just didn’t bother re-installing Raptr. Guess that means I won’t be missing it…

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