Playnite

 Recently I discovered a video game manager called playnite. Basically games have an icon in the software and you can launch them from it. One of the really cool things about it is that it can bring together all your games from multiple different sources. (I mean PC games). So basically I have games in Steam and from Epic. These are in separate launchers so if I want to browse my games I had to do that separately. One result of this was just that my Epic games tended to get less love because they are almost all free games even though there are some really good games and ones that were on my wishlist before I got them there. So now I can browse them all together which I feel is really cool. It can also bring games from many other launchers together. Best of all playnite is free.

At first I had gotten interested in GOG Galaxy. This is another piece of software that is also free. It is associated with another video game store. The great thing about this store is that when you buy games there you can download the actual installer and can play DRM free.  (With Steam you can play in offline mode but with the Epic launcher you have to be connected to the internet to play). GOG is also very committed to making old games work on modern computers and have committed to keeping games functional. So in a lot of ways I like the ethos of GOG. But the Galaxy software just doesn't work that great at unifying your library despite the fact that this is advertised as one of its main features. Basically it is difficult to get it to work to import the games and this functionality is entirely in the hands of the community rather than the actual developers at the company.

Playnite works much better in this regard. Another big advantage is that it is not tied to any specific storefront. It is just an open source project. One of the issues with these other launchers is that in a lot of ways they are designed to get you to spend money. They do this in one big way. When you open the program it immediately goes to the store page rather than to your library. With playnite because they are not selling anything it just brings up your library. So I may still need to access the other launchers particularly when actually installing the games. 

Basically, I want to freeze my spending on video games for a variety of reasons. I have plenty of games to last me a long time. My hope is that playnite will help me by cutting out the stores. Of course whether this alone will be effective remains to be seen but this is my hope.

I will say on the downside, I find the actual menus and navigating the software is not very intuitive. I hope that as I get familiar with it, it will start to seem less strange but it has been a bit of a challenge. Less so than getting the GOG integration to work but still. Something they could improve on.