Raptr Leaves Beta, Makes It Easier To See Which Games Your Friends Are Playing

Online gaming service Raptr has just dropped its beta tag and launched its 1.0 release, and it's safe to say that it's finally living up to its mission statement: to make it easy to play games with your friends. A year ago, Raptr rolled out a multi-protocol chat client that allowed gamers to see what games their friends were playing (this included support for both PC games and console games).That worked fairly well, but CEO Dennis Fong says that it came with one big caveat: it only worked if you got your friends to sign up for a Raptr account, which was obviously a significant hurdle. Raptr's latest release fixes this, allowing you to see if your friends are playing games on their PS3, Xbox 360, and PC (including casual Flash games, Steam and Xfire) — even if they don't have Raptr accounts. In other words, the service is now far more useful than it used to be.