Most of the games we've loved came from a person. A friend who wouldn't stop talking about something, a sibling who left a disc out, a coworker whose taste you'd learned to trust. So when we built the social side of Perthro, we started from that rather than from what most social apps optimise for. This post covers what a social network for gamers looks like in Perthro, and what we deliberately left out.
How Perthro's friends and feed work
You follow other players. Their activity shows up in your feed: games they've started, games they've finished or shelved, ratings, and reviews. You can react to any of it and reply. That's the whole thing.
It's closer to reading a friend's journal over their shoulder than to scrolling a timeline designed to keep you scrolling. There's no trending tab, no algorithmic "for you" feed and no follower counts on profiles. You see what the people you chose to follow are playing, in order.
That matters for discovery. "Everyone is playing this" is mostly noise. "The three people whose taste overlaps with mine all started the same game last week" is a real signal, and it's the one we want the feed to surface.
Why there's no leaderboard
The risk with any social feature in a game app is that it becomes a competition. Game tracking has a long history of this: achievement scores, completion percentages, hours-played rankings, year-end recaps that sort your friends by a number none of you picked. They're easy to build and good for engagement, and they slowly change how you relate to the hobby. You start farming a stat instead of playing a game.
So Perthro's feed doesn't rank anyone. There's no points total sorting the people you follow into winners and losers. Reactions exist so you can say "loved that one too" or "you stopped too early, the DLC is the good part," not so a counter can go up.
A star rating and a few honest sentences tell you something true about a person and a game. A leaderboard mostly tells you who has the most free time. Reviews in Perthro can be one line or a full essay, and the feed treats both the same.
Lists are the most useful thing you can share
The most underrated social feature in Perthro isn't the review. It's the list.
Beyond the basic statuses (playing, played, plan to play, shelved) you can make custom lists and share them. That sounds minor until someone sends you a good one: "six games to try if you liked that," "short games you can finish in a weekend," "the roguelikes I actually stuck with." A list from someone whose taste you know is worth more than any storefront recommendation row, because a person made it for a reason.
A shared list is also a gentler kind of interaction than a post. It doesn't ask for a reply and it doesn't expire. It just sits there, ready for the next evening someone has free time and no idea what to start.
What makes a social app for gamers worth using
From building this, a few principles we'd apply to any gaming social network:
- Follow people, not topics. Taste lives in individuals. A small feed of people you trust beats a large feed of everyone.
- Context over scores. "Slow first hour, worth it" helps a friend more than a number.
- No pressure to keep up. No streaks, no "you haven't posted in a while" nudges. Disappearing for a month should be fine.
- Room for quitting. Shelving a game should be as normal to share as finishing one.
- Small is fine. A feed of ten friends who actually play is more useful than a thousand followers.
Getting started
If you're new to Perthro, a good first week looks like this: follow a few people whose taste overlaps with yours, write a couple of short reviews of games you finished recently, and make one list that sounds like you and send it to a friend. It doesn't take long to have a small corner of the hobby that's actually yours.
Perthro is free on the App Store for iPhone (iOS 17 or later). If you want the longer version of why we built it this way, we wrote about what people mean by "Letterboxd for games".
