Game Tracker is a new videogame tracking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Simone Montalto, who is probably best known to MacStories readers for developing the excellent Book Tracker. In fact, Montalto has created an entire suite of tracking apps that also includes Movie Tracker, Music Tracker, and Habit Tracker. That experience with various tracking apps shows with Game Tracker, which does a fantastic job of tailoring to the particularities of videogames and leveraging metadata to allow users to make the app their own.
Let’s take a closer look.
I’ve tried a lot of videogame tracking apps, from ones that are designed specifically for videogames to those that are built into general-purpose media trackers. Depending on your needs, both approaches can work well, but the nature of videogames lends them to an app designed specifically for the medium. That’s because games carry a lot of important metadata that other types of media don’t, like the platforms a game is available on, the format, the gameplay modes, and more.
Game Tracker takes advantage of the unique information available for videogames, which gives it an instant advantage over general-purpose media apps. Pulling from the Internet Game Database, Game Tracker includes each game’s description, release date, ratings, developer and publisher information, game modes, player perspectives, platforms, completion times, screenshots, artwork, and trailers. Plus, the app lets users add their own ratings, track their progress, make notes, and record games they’ve loaned to friends.
Having all that data is useful by itself, but Game Tracker uses it far better than most apps I’ve tried. For example, there are five different ways to sort your games and 11 criteria for filtering them. Plus, Game Tracker allows you to build advanced sorting rules by combining multiple sorting criteria and to create elaborate saved searches by stacking filters. With so many ways to view your games, the built-in sorting and filtering features are often enough, but I appreciate that I can do a lot more than that, and I bet anyone with a big game collection will, too.
Game Tracker also allows you to add your own content to your collection, including the media format, progress, notes, tags, and the status of any games you’ve loaned out. You can create your own hand-curated lists of games, called spaces. For example, I created a Retro Games space to collect classic games I’m currently playing or playing soon. And you can bulk edit game data. From any collection view, pick “Select games” from the three-dot menu to select as many games as you’d like to edit.
Where Game Tracker really shines, though, is in the way it uses all the information pulled from IGDB and added by users. From the app’s main view, you can browse your collection in a wide variety of ways. You can always view all of your games at once, but you can also browse based on progress, release status, formats, smart lists, platforms, genres, and more. From the app’s primary view, you can remove any of these browsing options you don’t want, reorder them, and collapse sections as well.
Another nice design touch is that you are not locked into one particular layout when viewing games in your collection. The app offers six different options, and each view in the app can be set to a different layout.
If you like to track the time you spend playing your game collection, you can do that, too. For any game you’ve marked as being currently played, you can start a timer to track your total time played and take notes alongside the timer that will show up in the Notes section for that game. You can mark the percentage of the game you’ve played as well.
The total time played and percentage played will all show up in the app’s Statistics section, which collects high-level data about how much you’ve played, the dates you’ve played, your playing streak, and more. It’s a lot of data, but it’s perfect for anyone who wants to keep track of their progress. Though I haven’t used this feature much yet, I plan to dip my toes in further to see if it helps me keep up with my playtime goals better. When you start a timer, it also starts a Live Activity, so you can track your progress from your Lock Screen or the Dynamic Island as you play.
Tracking playtime from my Home Screen (left) and some of Game Tracker’s many Shortcuts actions (middle and right).
Live Activities aren’t the only modern feature packed into Game Tracker. The app includes a deep set of widgets for tracking a game you’re currently playing, any other game in your collection, and your spaces. There’s a widget that will drop you into Game Tracker’s search feature to find games, too.
The app also offers deep integration with Shortcuts, with actions to find games based on a variety of criteria, add metadata to existing games in your collection, create spaces and tags, and open and retrieve game entries based on the app’s long list of metadata, to name just a handful of the many actions. There are 10 different Control Center widgets, which can also be added to your Lock Screen, to open the app to a specific area or search for a game.
From an individual game’s view, you can select the three-dot menu button and pull up a list of similar games, too, which is great for discovery. However, I’d like to see a dedicated discovery section added to the app that’s populated with pre-built lists like New Releases and other categories for when I’m looking for inspiration on what to play next.
Finally, your collection syncs via iCloud across all platforms, backs up periodically, and can be exported in CSV or PDF formats with filters applied. I particularly like the simple export options, which make your data far more portable than in many other apps.
One thing Game Tracker doesn’t currently handle very well is unreleased games. I’ve added several games coming later this year that I want to play, and the app lists them as released now that it’s 2025. I also have a couple of games in my collection that don’t have a release date yet (I’m looking at you, Silksong), and those are given the release year of 1969, so Game Tracker assumes they came out decades ago. That makes managing upcoming games a little hard at the moment, but it’s also something I expect will get worked out in future updates, so it’s not a big deal.
If you’re the sort of person who likes to collect a lot of data about your hobbies and track things in your life, Game Tracker is perfect for you. It’s the kind of app that makes dipping in and out of a large collection of games easy because you’ll know which games are active and where you are in each. I love that you can leave yourself notes for the next time you resume a game, and the tagging feature lets me do things like remember which of my many retro handhelds I’m using for a particular game – a very NPC problem, I know. But even if you aren’t playing dozens of games across a pile of hardware, Game Tracker is one of the best ways to natively manage your videogame collection and playtime across multiple devices.
Game Tracker is available to download on the App Store. The free version allows you to track five games and create one space. With the Pro version, you can track an unlimited number of games and create as many spaces as you’d like for $1.49/month, $10.99/year, or a one-time purchase of $34.99.
