by Martin Brinkmann on May 24, 2019 in Uncategorized – No comments
Valve Software’s Steam, the Epic Mega Store, UbiSoft’s uPlay, Electronic Arts’ Origin, Gog Galaxy, the itch.io client, the Microsoft Store, Battle.net, Bethesda Launcher, and others.
The number of desktop clients for PC games exploded in recent time. While choice is good most of the time, it is exclusives and differences between the same release that makes the whole environment such a mess.
Each Store needs to be installed (with the exception of Microsoft Store and Gog Galaxy), and gamers may end up with several Store installations on their devices depending on the games they purchased. Fragmentation is an issue with each new gaming client increasing the level and practically all running on startup of the system by default.
An application to manage all games and to launch them from a dedicated interface does not exist currently. If you want to start a game, you need to either launch the game client and select the game afterwards, or activate a shortcut if it exists to start it (which will start the game client and the game).
Gog Galaxy 2.0
Gog is the first company that tries to do something about it. The upcoming Galaxy 2.0 client — completely optional — is an attempt to bring order into the chaos. Galaxy 2.0 includes cross-platform and cross-client game management functionality. Gog promises that users may import games from PC and consoles to manage these in a single interface.
For PC games, the company promises that users of Galaxy 2.0 may launch them directly from the program’s interface regardless of the actual platform and client.
The Galaxy 2.0 client offers more than that though: Gog highlights that you may use it to keep track of game stats across platforms, that Galaxy users may bring together all their friends from all platforms, will support cross-platform chat, and will introduce an activity feed that is also cross-platform to see achievements and recent game plays of friends.
Gog Galaxy 2.0 has not been released yet. Interested users may sign-up for a place in the beta to test a development release when it gets released.
Closing Words
The only gaming client that does not require installation attempts to bring games from all other PC gaming clients under a single roof, that is quite something. Galaxy 2.0 won’t do away with the requirement to install other gaming clients on the PC but it may make it a lot easier to manage all purchased and installed games.
The current client has some interesting features such as rollbacks to previous versions. You can check out our Gog Galaxy review here.
Now You: Do you have gaming clients installed on your PC?