I'd like something to track hours played in games for the fun of it. I like how Steam does this for the games I have there. So I was wondering if anyone here uses X-Fire, Raptr or something else to track hours played in games?

I guess a problem for GOG users would be many of the games are very old so I wonder if something like X-Fire would even support old stuff. For example, something running in DOSBOX could probably only be tracked as an instance of DOSBOX running, if they track it at all.

Anyway, does anyone use either of the ones I mentioned and how do you like them? Are they useful and worth having? How's support for older games? Is there anything else out like them that I've never heard of?

I used to track hours with the Raptr client and I wouldn't recommend it. They stick with their attitude of supporting almost exclusively Steam versions of the games but rarely support retail or other distributors, even games they mark as supported rarely work. Their game overlay impacts game performance and at least in my case it glitches most games so I decided to stop using it.
X-fire is better for detecting games but I decided to stop bothering with tracking because all the hours I had logged with Raptr would be "lost". I only use backloggery.com to register what I'm playing at the moment and what games I have completed.

I didn't realize Raptr (maybe X-Fire too?) have overlays. I need that like a hole in the head, just time tracking would be nice. I guess server browsing for an older shooter might be cool too such as say, the original Ghost Recon. I think X-Fire has server browsing if I remember correctly. I guess overlays aren't a big deal so long as there is an option to turn them completely off which is what I'd want to do.

I'm surprised Raptr is so Steam-centric. Steam already does time tracking anyway. It's for the other stuff I'd like to have it although I guess tracking Steam games too would be nice for an all in one place listing.

I noticed I could search on and find all the Might and Magic games and the Ultima games on Raptr but I don't know how they'd track old MS-DOS games. Maybe they just have a large database including old games but it has nothing to do with actually tracking stuff. A quick look at the Raptr site gave very little info on what they track which left me wondering about that. I haven't really checked into X-Fire yet.

They are very Steam centric. Every time there is a new game detection release the list includes like 20 Steam games, 5 F2P, 10 browser games, and 1 or 2 retail games most of the time. I don't get it either because the people that buy only from Steam don't need another client to do stuff that Steam already does on its own.
Before they redesigned the site each game page had some icons that flagged the games as supported for tracking, achievements, updating, etc. I don't know if the current site has those anymore but most GOG games I had installed weren't detected by Raptr anyway and I don't think that tracking worked for any DOS Box games.

X-Fire supports a number of GOGs out of the box, and I made some changes to an ini file so that it would support GOG versions of games where it only detected other versions, as well as adding partial support for GOGs it otherwise wouldn't support at all (though those are of little use to you as it wouldn't support many community features, such as time tracking, the currently played game being showed to your friends, and uploading videos/screenshots - those features require X-Fire's servers to know about the game, so I can't do anything about that).

Haven't updated it for a year or more though, and X-Fire has added full support for some GOGs in the meantime, making some of my changes redundant.

Having investigated the two of them further, Raptr looks useless to me. I don't need or want a gamers Facebook/Twitter that covers all platforms, etc. i just play PC games and just want to try and track what I can that isn't already covered by Steam. X-Fire might fit the bill somewhat although I'm not sure if it is worth bothering with to me. I posted a few questions about it on the X-Fire forums.

I did used to use X-Fire ages ago and forget now why I stopped. I think I didn't like the ponderous load time as it scanned for new games every time it started which was every time Windows started.

I ran into an article about X-Fire just getting an infusion of four million dollars invested by some firm. Apparently, Viacom sold off X-Fire about a year ago and now it has changed hands again recently. It kind of makes you wonder about the long term viability of X-Fire if Viacom saw no profitable future in keeping it versus selling it. I have a feeling Steam must have put quite a dent in their business by offering similar features in the Steam client.

It's too bad the Steam client which I use will not track time on non-Steam games you can add to it. That would be a nice feature but there's no incentive for Valve to do that so I doubt it will ever be added.

Well it turns out that X-Fire does support some GOG titles including those running in DOSBOX! I checked what I own and some stuff like old Ultima games are supported for example. HoMM3 is supported and I forget what else off the top of my head. There was a bunch of others I own that are not supported at this time. However when I asked about this in a thread on the X-Fire forums, one of their staff told me about support for GOG titles already existing in some cases and they encouraged me to post in a particular forum asking for others I wanted, specifying they are GOG games. So that was pretty cool.

I went and posted the games I'd like to see supported by X-Fire. We'll see if any of them come to be supported, who knows? Meantime I downloaded and installed the client, setup an account, etc. So I am going to try it for a while and see how it goes.

If more people who'd like this bother to post in the appropriate forums section there what GOGs they would like supported maybe we can get some results.

WTF are you talking about with the "steam centric" BS, Raptr is anything but!

yeah, there have been some issues for me with getting it to detect games but that has been mostly due to publishers fucking with the folder structure post-Raptr establishing support for them.

(like MMO publishers *cough*nexon*cough* switching to web based game launching and altering the games .exe in the process.)

but I have never had any problem with the client outside of issues on the program's side of things (like games not playing nice with -any- overlay, not just raptr's overlay) and even if a games doesn't show after auto detection it's fairly simple to manually add it ....

my Raptr & Xfire name is the same ( SogiYa ) if anyone wants to add me.

kinda hard to explain ... uhm, how to do this?

so I have this friend on Xfire from a guild long ago by the name of Gotrek, he still just uses Xfire instead of (IMO) upgrading to Raptr. now whenever I log into Raptr I see him listed under the tab for Xfire, he however just sees me show up on his Xfire client as if I had signed in naturally with my own Xfire client (despite not even having it installed on my PC).

in addition to that I also have my GFWL account attached to it, so I can be screwing around on my PC with the Raptr client running in the background, and have my wife's DDR achievements pop up as she plays with the gamebox it's self.

that's more or less how the program is supposed to function, Raptr is more like a umbrella client that anything else: you sign into Raptr, which functions just about identically to Steam or Xfire's chat elements, and then from there you add in additional accounts that you may have (so long as Raptr supports them, for example it cant fully support PSN accounts).

and for whatever accounts you add in to your Raptr account, Raptr will emulate that service to log you into it and access whatever shared functions it may have.

on top of that it also offers all the standard game management features a program like this should have (like overlay chat windows, game launching from within the program, and play time + achievements) so long as there isn't some bug with the game in question not playing nice with Raptr.

Well both X-Fire and Raptr have a lot of features I'm not really looking for in my particular case. I can see how they would be nice for those that like or have use for them though. For me, the most important thing is being able to track time played in non-Steam games. For this it appears X-Fire leads with some support of GOG games and a willingness to at least consider adding more GOG titles if you post requests for them.

Where it is newer I might have leaned towards Raptr if they supported GOG games and in particular any GOGs running with DOSBOX which now I find that X-Fire can and sometimes does support.

At least for now and probably for the foreseeable future, all the games I own are either Steam or GOG titles.