Earlier this week, Atari picked up the rights to the first five Wizardry games, the foundational dungeon crawlers from the early 1980s, with plans for remasters, reissues, and a long tail of merchandise. The news passed quickly through the corners of the internet that still remember playing those games on an Apple II in someone's basement. The thing that struck me, scrolling the reactions, was how many people said the same thing in different words. I don't even know if I still have a copy of that one. I'm not sure which platform it would even be on, if I did.
That is the small problem this post is about. Not the legal-rights one, which is Atari's to solve. The one underneath it, which is yours: that the library you actually own is scattered across half a dozen storefronts, none of which know about the others, and most of which do not particularly care to.
The library you don't quite own
If you are roughly my age and have been playing games seriously for the last twenty years, here is a partial accounting of where your library currently lives. There are Steam games on an account you made in 2007 with a name you would no longer choose. There are PlayStation games tied to a PSN account that was originally your old Vita's. There are Xbox games on a Microsoft account that is also somehow your work email. There are Switch games you bought digitally and a thicker pile that exist only as cards in a tin in a drawer. There are GOG copies of older PC games, an Itch.io library that grew during the pandemic from bundles, an Epic library you barely opened that nonetheless contains four games you actually paid for. There is, almost certainly, a Game Pass entry or a PlayStation Plus title you finished without ever quite owning.
None of those storefronts know about each other. Steam will gladly tell you that you have logged 312 hours in Civilization VI. It cannot tell you anything about Metaphor: ReFantazio, which you played on PS5, even though it was a game you played in the same calendar year on the same couch. PSN will tell you what trophies you have earned on PS5 and absolutely nothing about your ten-year Skyrim relationship on PC. Xbox will list achievements without acknowledging that you finished the same game on a different platform a decade earlier. Each storefront is honest about the slice of you it can see, and silent about the rest.
What this fragmentation actually costs
The thing fragmentation costs is not really convenience, in the small day-to-day sense. You can mostly find a game on the platform you played it on, if you remember the platform. The thing it costs is a picture of yourself as a player, across the whole sweep of the years you have actually been one.
If a friend asks you what your favourite RPG of the last ten years was, you will pause, because you cannot mentally walk down a single shelf. You will reach for Elden Ring, or Disco Elysium, or Persona 5 Royal, and then you will remember three more from the platforms you were not on at the time, and you will feel the small frustration of knowing you have forgotten more than you can name. The list of games you actually played is, somewhere, a real list. No platform has it. The version that exists in your head is partial, biased toward whatever you bought most recently or shouted about loudest at the time.
The other thing it costs is the ability to make sense of your own taste over time. The reviewer in your head has been having opinions about games for fifteen years, but the writeups, if any of them exist, are scattered across Steam reviews, old forum posts, Discord messages to friends, and a notes app you stopped using in 2019. The five-star rating you gave Outer Wilds on Steam in 2020 cannot speak to the four-star rating you gave Tunic on PSN in 2022, because they live in different rooms with different rules.
What an import actually does
This is where library import as a feature stops being a checkbox and starts being something more interesting. The reason we put the most engineering effort into library import early was that we had to. Without it, a games journal in 2026 is a notebook you have to fill in by typing every game you have ever played by hand, and almost nobody is going to do that, because almost nobody can remember more than two-thirds of the answer.
Perthro lets you connect your Steam, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live accounts at setup, and pulls the libraries from each into one merged shelf. Where the platforms expose them, achievements and trophies come along with the game, so the Hollow Knight you finished twice on Steam and once on Switch shows up as one game with two histories, not three different rows you have to mentally combine. The metadata for each title comes from IGDB, which is community-maintained and broad enough to cover the indie tail that any single storefront tends to miss.
The Nintendo side is harder, because Nintendo does not expose a public library API, and we are honest about that in the app: you can log Switch games manually, but they will not import automatically. That is a real limit and we are not going to pretend otherwise. GOG, Itch, and Epic are similarly manual today. The big-three import covers the bulk of most people's libraries; the long tail you fill in by hand once, and then you have it.
What you get back, after the imports finish on first launch, is a shelf that looks more like the actual life you have lived as a player than any single storefront has ever shown you. Hours from PC. Trophies from PSN. Achievements from Xbox. Stuff you typed in for the Switch shelf and the GOG corner. One library. The small one you have actually had this whole time, finally in one place.
Why this matters more than it sounds
It is easy to read the above and conclude that the value here is, like, slightly tidier organization. That is not it.
The value is that once your library is in one place, you can finally have a relationship with it as a whole thing, instead of as five fragments. You can write a single year-end list that is honestly about your year. You can see your own taste move over time. You can rediscover a game you genuinely loved in 2017 by scrolling backwards on a Sunday morning, instead of by accident when a friend mentions it at brunch. You can build a list called games I want to replay before I turn forty, drawn from every platform you have ever used, and watch it slowly empty over the next eighteen months.
You can also, importantly, make peace with the games you have not played and probably never will. A backlog spread across five platforms is invisible and feels infinite. A backlog you can actually see, in one list, is finite, and the act of moving a game to the shelved shelf instead of leaving it on plan to play becomes possible in a way it was not before. Honesty with yourself about your own library is, weirdly, one of the calmer outcomes of a single library view, and it is something the storefronts have no incentive to ever give you.
The library outlasts the platforms
The Wizardry news is a good reminder that the platforms move and the library is what is supposed to remain. The Apple II is gone. The PlayStation 1 is gone. Steam will not be here forever, although it will probably outlive most of us. The accounts you have games on right now are going to be transferred, sunsetted, merged, broken, restored, and broken again over the next thirty years, and the only continuous record of what you actually played is going to be the one you decide to keep yourself.
That is, ultimately, why we built Perthro the way we did. The TestFlight is open on iPhone right now: free, iOS 16 and up, with the invite at testflight.apple.com/join/XVxCdRcK. The library import for Steam, PSN, and Xbox is in the current build, alongside lists, friends and feed, reviews of any length, and custom themes. We are a small team in Alberta, and we read every piece of feedback that comes back through the in-app channel.
But the bigger point, regardless of which app you keep it in, is to keep some version of the merged library. A spreadsheet works. A paper notebook works. The Apple Notes app works. The point is to stop letting the storefronts decide what your library is, and to start letting the version of you who has been quietly playing for twenty years have a shelf you can actually walk down. The platforms will keep changing. The library is yours.