https://game-watch.agreon.de (I know, my naming is great) is a service to get updates for games that you are interested in.
I'd often watch game release previews like the E3 and put the games that interested me in some kind of list. Now I would have to check manually for news about a release date or in which stores they would be published. GameWatch takes off this work from me and maybe also from you :).
I know it was most probably done before in some similar way, but I didn't even search for alternatives until now. It would have been a good idea if I wanted to create a real market competitor, but that was not my motivation. I wanted to craft something that was my own, and not a copy of some product. I didn't want to spoil my creativity.
I guess the most asked question will be: Why don't you crawl all the games beforehand and let the user search in your database. After all, it would improve the usability as users would not have to wait for the crawl to happen on demand. Also, you could show useful information like price history etc. per store.
Well, besides the limited resources I wanted to invest, the project was born with a different idea than price monitoring in mind. Rather, the main idea was for me - as a user of many game devices - to get updated as soon as a game is added to a specific store (Maybe some games would be nicer to play on the Switch?).
A preliminary crawl would not really have helped in this case. Besides, the on demand crawl results are cached. So if a popular game is searched for often, the overhead won't really be noticeable.
Costs:
- ~5€ DataDog Logging
- ~10€ VPC (but that is also used for other things)
Remote: Not fully
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Node.Js, Typescript, k8s, Rust (personal)
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agreon
GitHub: https://github.com/agreon
Experienced Fullstack Dev. Love writing tools and such.