CartRack
A mobile companion app for DIY PC gamers who build their own 2.5-inch SSD 'cartridges' — scan the cartridge's NFC tag, log its game, artwork, last-played date, and playtime, and view the whole physical library as a digital shelf alongside play stats.
DIY PC tinkerers and physical-library enthusiasts who build their own Steam SSD cartridges
- NFC and QR scan to register a cartridge with its game, capacity, and a thumbnail from a user photo
- Shelf view that arranges the physical collection by platform, last-played, or completion percent
- Insert-to-track: detects the cartridge being plugged in and logs the session to per-game playtime stats
- Trade and resale listings that pull from the user's catalog with one tap, geared at the Steam Gist community
The PC-Cartridge-System repo hit 164 stars on GitHub Trending, a far stronger signal than typical hobby launches; the project explicitly calls out that organization, cataloging, and automation around cartridges is unsolved.
Mainstream press (Tom's Hardware, PC Gamer, TechSpot, Gamerant) covered a single Reddit user's DIY cartridge build in 2025 as a novelty/sentimental story, but no evidence of a sustained community or repeat demand beyond media curiosity; underlying 'PC cartridge' user base is a hobbyist-of-a-hobbyist niche.This PC gamer turned old SSDs into gorgeous cartridges for Steam games ↗PC gamer turns Steam games into cartridges with ingenious 2.5-inch SSD system ↗
Shelkesa9309/Steam-Games-Cartridges already provides the cartridge-to-library linking, and general game library trackers (Gamery, Keep Track of My Games) already do artwork + playtime + collections; the only gap is NFC-specific tagging, which is narrow.Shelkesa9309/Steam-Games-Cartridges - GitHub ↗Gamery: Organize Your Library - App Store ↗
Target users are DIY tinkerers who already build their own cartridges; they are unlikely to pay for a companion app when free GitHub tools exist and general library trackers (e.g., Gamery) sit at low one-time price points; addressable paying market is tiny.Gamery: Organize Your Library - App Store ↗Universal Game Collection & Backlog Tracker - Keep Track of My Games ↗
Framed by press as a nostalgic novelty/'rebellion against all-digital future'; without a hardware ecosystem, NFC companion apps depend on a fad-prone DIY trend and Steam itself (which already organizes libraries digitally) undermining the core use case.This PC gamer turned old SSDs into gorgeous cartridges for Steam games ↗Redditor makes 'game cartridge' system for their Steam library ↗
Mobile NFC read/write APIs are mature on iOS/Android and Steam Web API + SteamDB provide game metadata, artwork, and playtime; mapping a scanned NFC tag to a Steam appID is a straightforward data-layer task.PC Gamer Turns Steam Games Into Cartridges With 2.5-Inch SSDs ↗