A modern gamer’s lament: There are far too many PC launchers

The internet has taken gaming to a whole new level, but it has also helped usher in a major frustration among dedicated players.

There are far too many PC launchers.

OPINION

Gather around, everyone, and come with me on a magical journey through time and space to a time when PC gaming was a relatively straightforward affair and all was right with the world.

It was a simpler time, when we would tie an onion to our belt — as was the fashion at the time — fire up our PC, select a game from our desktop, and fire it up. Things have changed though.

Launching a PC game nowadays is usually accomplished via a separate program known as a “launcher” — the two best-known examples are probably Steam and UPlay, as they’ve been around the longest. A launcher contains the library of all your games, links to a store so you can access more games and content, and also automatically keeps your games up to date with patches and updates and the like.

In theory this is a grand idea, and for about a decade, when Steam was the major launch platform, it was great from a gamer’s perspective — you only had one program to worry about, all your games were there, and they would quietly update themselves in the background while you were playing something else.

For a number of publishers, however, Steam’s fees (they take a not insignificant cut of all sales) and policies were not optimal, causing some of the bigger games companies to start their own launcher for their games.

Before long, pretty much every major publisher had their own digital delivery platform, and with the recent situation where Metro Exodus and The Outer Worlds were announced as Epic Games launcher timed exclusives, PC gamers everywhere have been forced to roll their eyes and say “Oh, for smeg’s sake” as they added yet another potentially dedicated-use launcher to their hard drives.

By way of illustration, here are the launchers I have installed on my PC along with their associated publishers:

• Steam (Various)

• Uplay (Ubisoft)

• Xbox App (Microsoft)

• Battle.net (Blizzard)

• Origin (EA)

• Wargaming.net (Wargaming)

• Bethesda.net (Bethesda)

• GOG Galaxy (Various)

• Epic Games (Various)

That’s NINE launchers — and I’ll probably find another one I’ve forgotten about after I file this story — which means nine separate logins to remember and nine different programs to boot up depending what games I want to play; and while I write about computer games and technology for work, most really keen gamers are going to have multiple launchers.

Call of Duty, one of the most popular games, requires its publisher’s launcher.

Several of those launchers are what we call “dedicated” — that means they only cover games from that publisher.

The Uplay launcher, for example, only has games from Ubisoft (such as Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, The Division and Rainbow Six: Siege), the Battle.net launcher from Activision Blizzard only has their games (World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty Black Ops) and Wargaming.net only has World of Tanks, World of Warships and World of Warplanes.

Others, like Steam, GOG Galaxy and Epic cover a range of publishers; Steam is still the largest, GOG Galaxy covers a lot of classic games and Epic is the new kid on the block best known for Fortnite and now having Metro Exodus and The Outer Worlds.

Depending on which part of the internet you like to hang around in (Hi, Twitter!), the reaction to needing another launcher has either been the barely contained white-hot rage of a thousand burning suns, an indifferent Le Shrug or something about more choice for consumers being a good choice.

In a practical sense, having so many launchers can make it very easy for games to get “lost” — for example, I forgot I had Battlefield V installed on my PC because I rarely open the Origin launcher as it’s only for EA games, the most recent of which I reviewed was Anthem — and that was a month or so ago.

The Xbox App, which covers “play anywhere” Microsoft titles including State of Decay 2, Sea of Thieves and Forza Horizon 4, at least has the advantage of already being integrated into Windows 10, but it’s still not really front-and-centre in terms of launchers I regularly use (all the Xbox games are also, unsurprisingly, on my actual Xbox One console).

I fully appreciate that “I can’t remember which program I need to launch to play a computer game” is a very specific kind of first world problem, but that doesn’t make it any less of an irritation or a nuisance.

How many launchers can one man need, ya know?

Ultimately, I’d like to ask games publishers to stop and think for a minute about the need to create a new launcher, or if requiring users to get their game through a “new” launcher is really the way forward that best suits the gaming community rather than shareholders or the bottom line.

Sure, an established launcher might take a bigger cut of sales or whatever, but it generally offers a much better customer experience too.

Is there a solution to this admittedly first world problem? Not right now, sadly, and the answer is not “buy a console” — I already have those anyway, since Sony inconsiderately refuse to make the Uncharted games on PC and Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption 2 on consoles only purely to taunt me (that’s the logical explanation, right?)

Sure, the Nvidia GeForce Experience (which keeps that brand of graphics card drivers up to date) has a sort of universal launcher built into it as well, but that’s yet another program PC gamers need to run to do what should be the fairly straightforward task of playing games on their computer.

Google’s ambitious Stadia plans might render all this moot in a few years, what with their grand promises of streaming games to any device with an internet speed faster than a lethargic koala, but until then, it looks like PC gamers will have to resign ourselves to either juggling multiple games-launching programs or doing something radical like going outside, reading a book or spending time with our families.

Do you think there’s too many games launchers required for PC gamers? Continue the conversation on Twitter @RoyceWilsonAU

Originally published as A modern gamer’s lament: There are far too many PC launchers