Happy Hallowe’en, everybody! In the spirit of the holiday, various Raptr members got into the spirit. Orange is our color so it only made sense that we would do something related to pumpkins. Rico carved a fantastic Raptr Lantern that you can see above and Dave, Renee, Norm and Pat all came in costumes (or in Pat’s case, he came as his previous incarnation).

October 31st is also Charles’ birthday so in true Raptr tradition, we had something planned for him. A lunchtime match of Starcraft was scheduled but it wasn’t our usual Raptr map. We had a customized version prepared where everyone was given 100,000 minerals and gas except of course, for Charles.

If only we had gotten a photo of his expression when he saw a dozen Reavers drop in on his base.

We’ve safely and successfully moved to our new datacenter, and all is back up and running.  Again, sorry for the interruption; now, watch us grow!!

No more secret handshakes, no more private invites; we’re proud to open the doors to Raptr and share the service in an open public beta! If you’ve already been keeping tabs on us and are just itching to get started, you can sign up for an account and take a spin now. Otherwise, we’d love to share with you a little bit about what Raptr is and how we hope it will help you and your gaming experiences.

Being social is hard

Raptr was born out of a stellar team of people who are passionate about playing and discovering games. Naturally, one of our favorite pastimes we love to do is play games with our friends. What should be a seemingly easy process can be surprisingly frustrating and difficult.

Our team plays a wide variety of games ranging from desktop to consoles to Facebook. In every case, each game or system seemed to require a separate login before we could even begin to see whether our friends were playing. There was no single place to go to see what your friends were playing – until now.

Know when your friends are playing

Between Raptr and our Raptr client, we’ve created a service that automatically knows if you’re playing a game across nearly any platform including PC, Xbox Live, Mac, Flash, Social games, browser-based games, Steam, and even some games on the Wii and PS3, then notifies your friends that you’re playing.

But notifying your friends on Raptr that you’re playing is only half the battle.  We wanted to be able to play a game, and without any effort, inform all of our friends so they might join us or such that we might join them in a game. So we also built integration into services such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to automatically update your status on those sites. Your friends don’t even need to be on Raptr to see that you’re playing.

See how your friends are doing in their games

When you watch a TV show, the experience isn’t only during the time you’re watching it. In fact, a lot of the experience is in discussing the show afterwards with your friends. We realized that games have the same property. Whether we’re comparing high scores, describing some quirky moment or organizing a time to play, we find ourselves engaging in games even when we’re not playing them.

Raptr tracks how you and your friends are progressing in games and helps facilitate such conversations. We built technologies that enable us to automatically pull events happening in games, such as a friend leveling up her character in World of Warcraft, playing a new game for the first time, noting a particular time a friend tends to play, completing a song on Expert in Guitar Hero, or unlocking an achievement on Xbox Live. These events are shared with whomever you choose to share and the ensuing conversations and events expand even single player game experiences to multi-player like social experiences.

But even with this rich level of detail, our philosophy is, “make it automatic, make it easy.” So we designed it such that you only need to enter the appropriate identities once (e.g., your Xbox Gamertag) and we will sync everything for you.

Discover new games you might like

In terms of conversations about games, what better conversation than, “you should check out this game”? One thing we think is pretty cool about Raptr is that we intelligently recommend games to you that you didn’t even know existed or that you didn’t even know were out yet.  We do this by making recommendations based on what you and your friends actually own and play, something that we think will constantly improve the more you and your friends use Raptr.

Just getting started …

We’re pretty ecstatic about what we’ve accomplished so far but we realize the product is new and may be somewhat rough around the edges.  These features are just some of the things we’ve been working on. If you play around with Raptr, you’ll find that there’s a lot more we haven’t even mentioned yet.

Now that we are in public beta, improving the product is going to be a joint effort and we’re excited to have you as part of the team. We have many more features in the works such as a set of open APIs to enable anyone to hook into our platform to surface cool information from their games or websites.   Your input helps shape where Raptr goes from here.  If you’re a game developer and are interested in working with us, please drop us a line at bizdev@raptr.com.

We’d love to hear from you and have made sure you have plenty of ways to let us know your thoughts. We’re always watching our forums as well as those who follow us on our twitter account but you can also contact us directly through our feedback module on the site or even emailing us at feedback@raptr.com.

Have fun trying out Raptr! Game on!

Just about everyone at Raptr loves playing games.  In our line of work, we get to play the newest and most sparkly games out there, but there’s a soft spot in our hearts for older games that just seem timeless.  Thanks to Baz, we’ve got a ton of classic arcade games like Joust and Donkey Kong Jr., but Missile Command seems to be capturing our attention right now.  Just like our Ping Pong ladder, a few of us have engaged in a friendly competition to see who can survive the longest.  Since there really isn’t an end to the game, we can probably keep playing forever. 

In addition to the arcade games, Starcraft has resumed its consumption of our spare time these past few weeks.  Many of us have added an hour or two to our day to engage in a few friendly matches of Starcraft.   It’s amazing how a ten year old PC game has managed to capture our attention for so long. From the Zergling rushes to the Siege Tank attacks, there are so many moments in Starcraft that we’ll treasure.

Will we be playing Starcraft 2 with such fervor in 2018?  Or will there be a healthy cottage industry dealing with vintage PC rigs for games like Starcraft?  What ancient games do you still play today?

Things are really busy here in the Raptr jungle. Everyone is coming in bright and cheerful in the mornings and burning the midnight oil working on amazing things for Raptr. I am one of the web developers here at Raptr as well as an avid gamer. It’s funny that while all of us are “electronic” gamers at heart the current passion here is Ping Pong.

A few days ago, there was an epic battle between John and Pat. Pat was heavily favored to win because of his skill and experience, but John had been working his way up the ladder steadily. Surmounting seemingly impossible odds John prevailed with some skilled serves and inspired returns. However, the story isn’t over as Pat seeks to reclaim his standing. Each match between them has drawn most of the company in as an audience, eliciting cheers and cries of sympathetic anguish with every point.

Pat hasn’t reclaimed his position yet but is slowly moving back up the ladder in hopes of taking back what he feels is his rightful place.