We have an exciting announcement to share with you. Today, we announced the launch of the Raptr Partners Program which will help our partners reach out to the Raptr community easily and enhance the gaming experience for fans of their games. For the Raptr community, this means that it will be easier to share cool in-game data such as stats, ranking, achievements, and progress to your friends for our partners’ games.

Also, as part of today’s announcement, we announced an awesome group of partners that will be participating in the launch of the Partners Program. In addition to our previously announced partners, NHN USA and Razer, leading online gaming companies Sony Online Entertainment, Gala-Net, and GamesCampus as well as the leading gaming network cards provider, Bigfoot Networks, have joined the Raptr Partners Program.

With this new program and our growing list of industry leading partners, we are continuously making games more social at Raptr. We believe this new group of partners has the potential for Raptr to reach 10 million gamers including fans of Sony Online Entertainment MMOs, Gala-Net’s gPotato gaming portal, and GamesCampus’ sports-focused portal. This is great news for the Raptr community since this provides more opportunities to discover people who are playing similar games.

Below is what Louis Figueroa, Executive Director of Business Development, from Sony Online Entertainment had to say about joining the Raptr Partners Program:

Raptr’s consumer-friendly service and seamless integrations with the top social networks provide an easy way for us to reach new players in a very natural way. Raptr makes it simple for players to let their friends know when they’re playing our games, something that helps drive more interest and awareness of our titles.

If you are a game publisher or a hardware company interested in learning more about the Raptr Partners Program, please visit http://partners.raptr.com or check out the official release.

You might have noticed that something looks a bit different about the Raptr site today.  We just took the covers off of our newly redesigned Raptr site.  So what has changed as part of this redesign?  Well… a lot.

The first thing you’ll notice after signing-in to the site is that you’ll now see an orange arrow button that allows you to go your profile page.  We decided to split the Raptr dashboard page and the profile page to put more focus on new activities in the dashboard page and to give our users a more dedicated page for expressing their gaming life.

Profile Page

When we decided to go ahead and create a dedicated Raptr profile, we started discussing what an ideal profile page should look like for our users and we came up with one simple mission: make the profile page the best resource available about a person’s gaming profile.  We made the personal profile info more visible and made it easier to see the recently played games and the most played games by the user.  With the new profile page, not only can my friends have a better view of what type of games I’ve been playing, but other people that come across my gaming profile will quickly be able to tell that what type of gamer I am.

Game Page

As you may know, all of us at Raptr love playing games and the only thing we love more than playing games is being able to discover new games to play.  To address both our love of playing and discovering new games, we redesigned the games page to better serve both existing fans as well as people looking for a new game by showing the latest news, videos, reviews, and gaming activity stats from the Raptr community.  Also, in addition to providing more information about a game, we’re enabling quicker access to the game by allowing users to buy packaged products, download free-to-play games, and play Flash games right from the game page.  We believe all of these enhancements will help fans of the game to find interesting new information and friends to play with as well as help people learn more about the game and get quicker access to game content.

Games Browse Page

I did mention that we love discovering new games, right?  To take the game discovery process one step further, we also improved the way you can search for a new game even when you don’t know the exactly which game you’re looking for.  Our new games browse page allows people to find games based on genre, platform, ESRB rating, and release date.  So if you want to play the latest Xbox 360 fighting game, our new games browse page will help you find it!!

This is just the beginning of our site redesign effort, and we’d love to hear from you what you think of the site redesign so far.  Please feel free to share your thoughts on our forums.

Game On!