vs.

These are the things I search for on my days off. I have GoodReads to help me track my books, Letterboxd for tracking my movies – now I need a site for my video games!

After a perfunctory Google of “goodreads for video games” I came across two sites that launched in 2013:
Dpadd
Grouvee

Time to sign-up, compare and contrast, and let you know who comes out on top!

Dpadd is currently winning in the “sign-up and get going” realm. You fill out the form (or log-in using Facebook, Twitter or Steam account info) and you’re on that familiar screen with your info on the left and a feed in the middle. You can add what you are currently playing, played, want to play, or rate/review a game all from this page.

Grouvee tries to help you build a “game shelf” and has a list of the “most popular” games from several genres, which is has you rate and list as either Playing, Played, Wishlist, Backlog or creating a whole new shelf (I’m thinking my first shelf will be “abandoned” for those games too bad to finish).

Dpadd is definitely prettier. The dark gray background with light gray text, the blue border – someone took a aesthetics class along with their coding class.

Grouvee is a bit more sparse in design but WOW is there a lot of information on the game pages. Here is the page for Tomb Raider. It lists every platform it is available on, the publisher and developer information, box art, and user ratings and reviews.

In contrast, Dpadd just the basics – original release date, overall rating from other users, how many people are playing/want to play, what you have said about the game and a feed of recent activity about the game.

On your “Game Collection” page on Grouvee, you will find the release date for the game, when you added it to your list, and dates when you played the game (helpful for single-player campaign games). Dpadd doesn’t seem to have this feature at all, which kind of annoys me because I tend to use these sites to keep track of WHEN I did certain things.

Dpadd lets you link quickly to your Steam, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, and Twitch.tv profiles. Grouvee only has a place to enter your Steam URL. Grouvee is also beta testing posting to Facebook for you, I don’t see anything like that on Dpadd (not sure if that is a pro or a con considering how I feel about Facebook right now LOL).

Both let you create “shelves” or “lists” that can be customized, so you could make a “favorites for Xbox” or “best games I ever played” shelf.

Neither site lets me pick which system I played the game on, which would be helpful since for some games there are additional levels based on which platform you chose.

Neither site has a way to embed your profile information into your blog or other social site, which makes it hard to spread the word and find your IRL friends.

Both sites are relatively new. I’m going to continue to play with both and see who wins my affections.

Have you used either of these sites? Which do you prefer?