Nicheloom

Market intelligence for builders — see what's gaining traction before it's crowded.

I built a site that turns your Steam gaming hours into a RL skill tree

Details

External ID
47667008
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
I built a site that turns your Steam gaming hours into a RL skill tree
Website domain
alternatelife.xyz
Launched
April 6, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
8
Upvotes percentile
0.4813624678663239
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hey,A bit of context..So I think last week was my last straw, I hit 8k hours with dota and holy ** It finally hit me how much time I wasted on that game.I'm a software developer, I always wanted to develop something and put it out but was scared shitless to do so, I was kinda afraid to get bad traction, to fail or even worse to be completely ignored.so I decided to address two of these issues at once, stop playing dota and spend the weekend building a website that let you see what you could've done with your gaming hours.As an avid gamer for the last 20+ years, I know that it's only theoretical, cause sometimes, after a long day u just wanna chill infront of a game and you wouldn't go get a pilot license, obviously.but, a lot of other times, I would spend my days off, weekend, just gaming 10 hours straight like a mad man.In any case, hope u like it and maybe it sparks something in u!

Enrichment

Theme
indie hacker passion projects
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Vertical SaaS
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
gamification tool for steam hours
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes This can be built quickly by querying the public Steam Web API for play history and mapping game categories/hours to an interactive skill tree UI using standard frontend libraries.

Discussion

10 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Promotes productivity pressure over leisure enjoyment, Reinforces hustle culture and efficiency mindset, Doesn't account for corresponding skill mapping from gaming experience, Frames leisure time as inherently wasteful

Feature requests: Map gaming hours to corresponding real-world skill levels, Add 'chill scale' or certificate for low-engagement metrics

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 205 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #106 of 206 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 159 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.