Over the last few days I have been using a thing and I thought I would sit down and talk about it this morning. I’ve known about Good Ole Games or GOG as they refer to themselves these days for years. They were a handy shop for buying old games that came with dosbox pre-configured to launch without horrible side effects. At some point they launched the Galaxy Client an it was “fine”. It did the job and presented any games I happened to own on that platform in a pleasant manner. The only game I really owned through GoG was Witcher 3, and only then because a download code came with a video card I had purchased. Since GoG is now owned by CD Project Red it makes sense that they would be handing out OEM codes through their official storefront. To be truthful I had the client installed but I never spent much time with it… that is until I was made aware of some significant changes.
Once upon a time there was a thing called Raptr and I loved the way it kept track of my games played. In part a bit of the reason why I started manually tracking games played in each month was because I was no longer using Raptr. The client reached a point where they integrated way too much stuff into it and it seemed to be a bit of a drag on my system. Over the last several days I have seen a bunch of these cross-platform gaming stats showing up on social media, but I think the first one I remember seeing was my friend Maeka. This lead me down a path of trying to see what had changed with GoG and being pleasantly surprised. The challenge with the client is the fact that I am already heavily bough into the Steam store and the inertia tying me there is strong and mostly keeps me from ever wanting to buy a game elsewhere as steam has served as a single launchpad for all of my games.
Seeing this as a problem, it appears that GoG has worked hard on trying to come up with the answer. Instead of creating yet another walled garden of exclusive content, they went the opposite direction and have created a client that seemingly integrates with everything else. Now I have this single pleasant interface that delivers up all of the content that exists regardless of the store front. This is the point where you are just about to tell me “but Bel, Nvidia Experience already does this and offers graphical configuration options”, and that is absolutely true. However what GoG does is give me back some of that Raptr functionality of tracking the time played and achievements earned from every single game on the list and allowing me to see what my friends are also playing.
The activity feed has been real awkward over the last several days as folks on-board their way into the platform and it catalogs the past decade worth of gaming. However past that initial set up phase as people find out about GoG Galaxy 2.0, it then becomes a valuable way of seeing what my friends happen to be doing. I would love to see them integrate with something like Player.me or maybe just outright buy them to add some of the missing social features. Like when a friend earns a hard achievement I would love to be able to do something simple like give them a thumbs up. That said what is there has switched me to pretty much keeping it up and running at all times, and has greatly increased my willingness to venture off of Steam and purchase games from another platform.
This all works because they did something somewhat brilliant. Instead of negotiating deals with all of these publishers, they went down the road of allowing for community supported Python integrations to be snapped into the client. Many of these integrations are currently being maintained by GoG, but are being treated as open source projects allowing anyone to look at what the code is doing and figure out how to adapt this to other platforms. As it stands right now these are the following integrations I have found, and you can get to them by typing in the GitHub Search Box in the settings>integrations interface.
- Battle.net
- Bethesda.net
- Epic Games Store
- GOG.com
- Guild Wars 2
- Humble Bundle
- Minecraft
- Origin
- Paradox Plaza
- Path of Exile
- PlayStation Network
- Rockstar
- Steam
- Uplay
- Wargaming.net
- Xbox Live
As you will notice there are still several that are missing, and the integrations all support different functionalities. The biggest thing that I see missing from various store fronts is the ability to synchronize the friend list. The killer feature for me is being able to integrate and list out everything that I happen to have available through Humble Bundle, since more than once I have re-bought a game that I already had access to through another platform. Humble Bundle is also artificially inflating the numbers since a lot of those games I have already redeemed to Steam and are still showing up in their “non-drm” version available as a zip file download.
I realize that Scopique was joking, but I occasionally do feel like I need to throw this out there. My blog is not sponsored by anyone. Every so often I will latch onto a product like GoG Galaxy 2.0 Client like I am talking about today or my many posts about Parsec streaming client and evangelize about them. This is not because I am getting some kickback from the company, but instead because they are products that I really do find indispensable and want to share them with my friends. I live in this weird space where I consider my readers and the folks I interact with on social media to be friends, and that we are all in this together as some bizarre collaborative experiment. At this point I have turned down what would probably have been thousands of dollars worth of payola that I get offers of through the email accounts associated with this site and my podcast. My opinion is firmly not for sale, but having said that… seriously check out Galaxy 2.0 because I personally find it super cool.
I’m hoping we eventually see a little more functionality, but even at this, it’s fantastic for organizing everything.