Am I too late?

or finding inspiration

I was working on my passion project a few days last week, and by days I mean during lunches and late nights after the baby falls asleep. I wanted to give users some new graphs to help with making decisions. Got a POC using data already available, and was pretty happy.

Some background on the passion project, StateTrak. It tracks your stats during games of Counter-Strike and gives users access to this data in a mobile app.

Cut to earlier this week, Counter-Strike has a new update. It looks pretty cool, some new content and feaures. But as I scroll I see that they have added graphs... With some of the data I had added as well...

My heart sank, I thought I had found a feature that people might want, and I guess the CS:GO devs also thought so. I wanted to use this feature to pull users, but now players can just use their game client.

The whole "incident" made me think am I too late? I mostly develop this app because I like to work on it and I use it myself. But there is always a hope that I could one day release and make some passive income from it. But to do that I need to make it something that other people find useful. If the game itelf is now starting to develop these features, what value can I bring?

The graphs hade realy excited me as an extension of the experience of playing Counter-Strike, and maybe I should find some comfort in that I apparently had found a feature worthy of the game. But now I need a new feature to draw players. So I'll finish up my graphs, maybe find some data that Counter-Strike isn't using. But for now I'm back to building for me.

So this is a bit of a "back to the dawing board" moment for me. What will my next feature be afer the graphs? I don't know yet, but I'm looking forwad to discovering it!