There is a particular kind of Sunday in the middle of May when nothing is coming out. The spring releases have already landed, the summer ones are still just trailers, and the gaming internet goes briefly, pleasantly quiet. You open whatever app you use to keep track of your games, and there is nothing new to log, nothing fresh to rate, no shiny thing to add to a wishlist. On a lot of platforms, that is a dead end. The app was built around the release calendar, so when the calendar goes quiet, the app goes quiet with it.
We think that quiet week is one of the better arguments for building Perthro the way we have. Because the part of a gaming app that should still feel alive on a slow Sunday is not the storefront and not the new-releases shelf. It is the feed: the small, ongoing record of what the people you follow are actually playing.
What a social feed for gamers is actually for
Perthro has a friends-and-feed layer, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because "social" is a word that has been stretched into uselessness by the bigger platforms.
In Perthro, you can follow other players. When you do, their activity shows up in your feed: the games they have started, the ones they have moved to played, the ratings they gave, the reviews they wrote. You can react to any of it, and you can reply. That is the whole shape of it. It is closer to watching a friend keep a journal than to scrolling a timeline engineered to keep you scrolling.
The reason that matters is that game-tracking is quietly a social act even when you do it alone. Half the games most people play arrived as a recommendation: a friend who would not stop talking about something, a sibling who left a disc out, a coworker whose taste you trust. A feed that shows you what specific people are playing, rather than what is trending in aggregate, is just a way of keeping that channel open. It is the difference between "everyone is playing this" and "the three people whose taste actually overlaps with mine all started the same thing last week." The second one is a real signal. The first one is mostly noise wearing a hat.
The scoreboard problem
The honest worry with any social feature is that it turns into a competition. Tracking platforms have a long history of this. Achievement scores, completion percentages, hours-played leaderboards, a year-end recap that ranks your friends by some number none of you chose. It is easy to build, it is easy to make sticky, and it slowly changes how you relate to the hobby. You stop playing games and start farming a stat.
We have tried hard to keep Perthro on the other side of that line. The feed shows you what people played and what they thought. It does not rank your friends. There is no points total quietly sorting the people you follow into winners and losers. Reactions exist so you can say "I loved that game too" or "you should not have finished it, the DLC is the good part," not so a counter can tick upward.
This is partly a design choice and partly just a matter of taste. A five-star rating and a few honest sentences tell you something true about a person and a game. A leaderboard tells you who has the most free time. We would rather build the first thing. The reviews you write in Perthro can be any length, from one line to a full essay, and the feed treats a one-line review and a thousand-word one with the same respect. The point is the thought, not the volume.
A list is something you hand to a person
The most underrated social object in Perthro is not the review. It is the list.
Alongside the basic statuses (playing, played, plan to play, shelved) you can build your own custom lists, and you can share them. That sounds like a small feature until you have actually received a good one. A thoughtful list from someone whose taste you know is one of the friendliest things another player can give you. "Six games to try if you liked that one." "Short games you can finish in a single weekend." "The roguelikes I actually stuck with." Those carry weight that no storefront row of recommendations ever will, because they come from a person and not a model.
A shared list is also a slower, kinder kind of social interaction than a post. It does not demand a reply. It does not expire. It just sits there, useful, the next time the person you sent it to has a free evening and no idea what to start. The backlog reordering and the "next up" view make your own lists practical for you; sharing makes them practical for the people you play alongside.
What Perthro's feed is not, on purpose
It would be dishonest to describe the social side of Perthro without being clear about its edges, because some of them are deliberate and some of them are just where the beta is today.
Perthro is an iPhone app, and right now the feed lives entirely inside that app. There are no public profile pages on the web. If you write a review you are proud of, you cannot yet hand someone a link to it in a browser; they need the app and an account to see it. That is a real limitation, and we are not going to pretend it is a feature. It is simply the state of a young product that is iPhone-first by choice. There is no iPad, macOS, or Android client either. We would rather get one platform genuinely right than spread a thin version of Perthro across five.
What that buys you, for now, is a feed that is small and quiet on purpose. It is not trying to be a public broadcast or a personal brand. It is a place where a manageable number of people you actually chose to follow keep an honest record of what they are playing, and you do the same back.
A good week to be here
If you have read this far on a slow Sunday in May, the timing is not entirely an accident. We are in the calm stretch before the summer noise. Summer Game Fest and the next Steam Next Fest both land in June, and once they do, everyone's wishlist is going to take on water for a month straight.
A feed full of people you trust is exactly the thing that makes that flood survivable, and the quiet week before it is a good time to start one. Follow a few players whose taste overlaps with yours. Leave a couple of honest reviews on games you finished this spring. Build one list that genuinely sounds like you and send it to a friend. By the time the June trailers start, you will have a small, warm corner of the hobby that is yours, and it will still be there next May when the calendar goes quiet again.
Perthro is free during the TestFlight beta and runs on iPhones with iOS 16 or later. The invite is open at testflight.apple.com/join/XVxCdRcK. Come keep a journal where the games are; we will see you in the feed.