8 mo. ago • 95%

PC gaming's many launchers, reviewed for 2024: Steam still puts the rest to shame

www.pcgamer.com PC gaming's many launchers, reviewed for 2024: Steam still puts the rest to shame

Let's put a score on them all—the good, the bad, and the GOGly.

Games @sh.itjust.works PC gaming's many launchers, reviewed for 2024: Steam still puts the rest to shame

69 comments

If you're going to try and compete with something like Steam, you need to actually compete.

Most launchers are storefronts at best and nothing else. Often the buying experience isn't even good.

38
- I would like to see Steam broken up so it is just as a storefront as well
  
  -21
  
  why?
  
  14
  
  Do you mean to say that Steam has a store front separate from the launcher?
  
  2
GOG Galaxy is pretty good. You can integrate with just about anything so if I want to play something and forgot where I own it, I can just load up GOG and it tells me where and even launches it for me.

The stats are cool too. You can see how many hours you've played something on any platform (including consoles)

14
- While I liked it, the lack of controller support made me switch to Playnite back in my Windows gaming days.
  
  5
  
  Playnite is awesome. One of the few pieces of software I really miss having on the Linux side of things.
  
  Once you have it set up, you truly have everything gaming in one launcher. Non-steam-VR platforms, emulators, etc.
  
  And I liked the UI a lot better than Galaxy, too, but that's more subjective.
  
  5
- Integrate with just about anything except Linux?
  
  5
- Have they fixed integrations? A few years ago, all integrations consistently were breaking one by one,which made the usage very frustrating
  
  1
  
  A lot of these are specific to the integration. I had to uninstall the steam one and then install a newer fork.
  
  1
It's weird how ruthlessly it tears down battle.net for its interface, but doesn't even mention it for steam

14
- I like steam's UI. Only thing that I wish it was better is steam forum's UI. I wish it was more like lemmy, where you can better see who answered you. Other stores don't even have forums, except maybe for GoG, I'm not sure about that one.
  
  8
  
  search for steam forums has the worst ui they could have possibly made, quotes of posts are completely fucked
  
  4
  
  I generally agree with you but watch this video, it'll show what steam could look like
  
  1
- It's kinda the same for EGS. They added a bunch of things like achievements, user scores and critic scores, but no mention of those.
  
  This doesn't take away that it runs like a buggy mess sometimes. I just hate false equivalencies
  
  5
EA App is not even a little bit better than Origin. Offline mode straight up doesn't work in the EA App, which has been reported so many times and ignored. You can't move your installation to another drive like you could with Origin. You can't gift games or DLC to your friends in the EA App like you could in Origin. EA apps sucks so much that when I recently purchased Mass Effect Legendary Edition for the ridiculous deal of 90% off (on Steam), and then remembered I would have to use the EA App to play it, I immediately refunded it. Given a choice, I would happily go back to Origin. I hate the EA App so much. It deserves a negative score.

8
Shame there's no HGL or Lutris...

4
yeah I mean who can compete with family share. wait what. one person being on means the library is unavailable????

3
- Ya I never understood that. I can understand that one game being locked while someone is playing, but everything is ridiculous
  
  3
- I've always thought that was something they had to put in place to place publishers. I mean, sharing is basically the same as stealing, right? So they had to make it really dumb in order for pubs to go along with it?
  
  1
  
  I doubt it. It makes it essentially useless nowadays to given how many single player games have a online requirement.
  
  0
Steam always or lutris if push comes to shove

2
Sadly steam is no longer a viable platform for purchasing games in Argentina, so I have to disagree with this article

1
- Sadly Argentina is no longer a viable country, so steam had to disagree with being involved.
  
  14
  
  For those out of the loop and don't care to check, Argentina and Turkey have had very volatile currencies for years now. Developers had to constantly update the pricing on those countries because the currencies keep losing value. So Valve decided to ease the burden on the developers and let them set the pricing based on the USD. That price then get converted to the local currency based on the exchange rate. When the exchange rate is 1 USD to ~800 peso it's no wonder that game prices are insane.
  
  17
  
  Was is ever to begin with? In any case luckily the Microsoft store still has competitive prices so we still can use that
  
  3
Is there a universal launcher like Lutris available for Windows? I was looking to build a gaming HTPC and want to interface with it with just only a controller, just like a console.

1
- Playnite.
  
  8
  
  Seconding Playnite, works stupidly well with everything from emulators (it can even download and install them to folders from within if you want that), and with add-ons shit gets wild
  
  5
- Playnite. Combines all games from all connected launchers into one and configurable/themeable to your hearts desire
  
  8
- I use Playnite. It automatically adds all you games from all famous launchers, lets you add games manually, download the meta data for it and has theme and plugin support.
  
  4
- The Armory Crate SE app on the Asus Ally does a great job launching games from all the different stores/launchers.
  
  I've been wondering how hard it would be to get it working on another PC.
  
  1
- Launchbox has got you covered.
  
  1
- Heroic Games Launcher
  
  1
- Does steam count? I use it to launch non-steam games.
  
  1
  
  From other launchers like Itch, Epic & GOG as well?
  
  1
- (not for windows, OS) Maybe have a look at Bazzite? It's supposed to be a SteamOS but Fedora based. I've been meaning to have a look at it eventually, so i dont know how it actually is, maybe it's garbage for all i know
  
  1
  
  There is ChimeraOS too, based on Arch.
  
  The problem with Linux is that you will always have to tolerate a nontrivial section of games being straight-up unavailable, of games breaking, running suboptimally and requiring hacky solutions to run, and the complete absence of first-party support from hardware manufacturers and game developers. It's not suitable for HTPCs despite having terrific UI unfortunately.
  
  2
- Launchbox. But the 10foot controller interface is behind a paywall with a weird scheme.
  
  0
  
  I think it depends on what type of controller. Dualshock 4s and Dualsenses are natively supported by Windows and you don't really need DS4 anymore to work with Launchbox. Xinput controllers may need a special driver.
  
  1

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