Raptr

» see raptr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

raptr showed up bundled with the amd catalyst driver install somewhere around 2014. anyone running a radeon card on windows hit the bundled checkbox during the install and ended up with an overlay called amd gaming evolved on every boot. underneath the amd branding it was raptr, a separate product from a small mountain view studio that had been live as a standalone client since '08. dennis fong was the name attached, the same dennis fong who had co-founded xfire eight years earlier.

i did not pay much attention to it at the time. anyway, the overlay would pop a notification when it thought your gpu was running below the optimal settings for a game it had a profile for, and offer to apply the recommended config. there was a benchmark mode and an achievements list with raptr-internal points you could redeem for in-game keys (close enough). most pc gamers i knew on frmtr disabled the overlay within a week. it overlapped with steam's overlay and with nvidia's geforce experience without doing anything new.

the standalone raptr client had been around since the public beta on september 3 '08. fong's pitch in '07 had been an xbox-live-style social layer for pc games, since pc had no console-level activity tracking at the time. by '14 the social side had been quiet for years, the rewards system and the amd driver bundle had become the main story. raptr's most-cited user count was 22 million registered accounts as of march 2014, the active number was much smaller.

amd ended the gaming evolved partnership on october 12 2016. anyway, the radeon driver moved to a unified crimson software stack with no third-party overlay. the rewards program at raptr closed on april 30 2017. the standalone raptr client shut down on september 30 '17. fong wrote a goodbye post pointing out that nvidia's geforce experience and amd's crimson now covered the optimization use case directly, and that there was no room left for a third-party layer to do the same job. the plays.tv video-clip product that had spun out of raptr in '14 went on as a separate company for a while after.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

the core feature in '08 was activity tracking. you installed raptr, you played a game, the client wrote a record of which game and for how long. you could share that record on a profile page or push it to twitter and facebook (back when those still had a useful share api). the social-network-for-gamers framing was the original pitch and what most early coverage focused on.

the optimization feature came later. either way, raptr built a database of recommended graphics settings for popular games at common gpu and resolution combinations. the client looked at your hardware, looked at the game, and suggested a settings preset that should give you a target frame rate. the suggestions were reasonable for the gpus they had profiles for and useless for everything else. amd's value in the partnership was the database covering radeon cards specifically.

~ the amd deal ~

amd announced gaming evolved as a partnership with raptr in february '14, replacing the older amd radeon ray-tracing branding. for some reason, the bundle gave amd a built-in driver-overlay story to compete with nvidia's geforce experience, which had shipped the year before and was bundled with the geforce driver. the deal also gave raptr a captive distribution channel of every radeon install in the world, which solved the user-acquisition problem the standalone client had been losing on.

the catch was that amd was paying for distribution and raptr was paying for development. by '15 nvidia's geforce experience had moved past raptr in feature parity, with built-in shadowplay video capture, broadcast, and driver auto-update. raptr's plays.tv video-capture spinoff in '14 tried to match that, but capture was a feature inside geforce experience, not a separate product anyone wanted to install. amd's crimson stack in late '15 quietly removed the need for a third-party app, and by october '16 the partnership was over.

~ what really happened ~

the shutdown notice in april '17 closed the rewards program with about a month's warning. accumulated points were redeemed against a smaller and smaller key catalog as the partner studios pulled out. the standalone client kept running through the summer with a goodbye banner on top of the launcher. on september 30 '17 the servers went off and the desktop client became unable to log in.

fong moved on to plays.tv as a standalone company, then later founded plays inc which pivoted to a creator-economy clip product. xfire had died in 2016, raptr in '17, both of the dennis fong gaming-social companies died within a year of each other for the same reason. steam and discord owned the social and the overlay parts of pc gaming, and the gpu vendors owned the optimization part. there was no slice of the screen left for a third-party gaming-social client to occupy.

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