Hey Folks! This is going to be a bit of a niche topic, but I guess in truth pretty much everything that I talk about is a niche topic. Most people do not give a shit about the minutiae of whatever build I happen to be working on in an ARPG that I have spent over 2000 hours playing. Anyways… some years back there was a dream proposed by GOG of having a single interface to interact with all of your games. The problem with that was that GOG Galaxy was a bit of a mess. It consumed a ton of resources and regularly disconnected from all of the platforms you were capable of connecting it to… never quite living up to the promise of giving you a single interface to view and launch all of your games through a single application. A few months ago I heard about an open-source project called Playnite that is attempting to actually make good on this dream and yesterday I finally got around to installing it and checking it out.
The base install of Playnite supports Amazon Games, Battle.net, EA App, Epic, GOG, Humble Bundle, Itch.io, Steam, Ubisoft Connect, and Xbox Gamepass. There are also a wide number of community-supported addons that grant further access to other game libraries. For example, I am contemplating installing the XCLoud integration that would add all of the games that I have access to via a web browser and Microsoft Gamepass on XCloud to the interface. There are also addons for platforms like Nintendo or Playstation that just give visualization into your total game library without actually allowing you to launch them. There is apparently fairly robust support for emulators and launching the game titles that you have sitting in rom/iso form on your system, which is something I will likely explore at a later date.
One of the aspects that I dig so far is that there is extremely robust support for filtering and grouping your games. Right now I am using the most simplistic grouping of “installed” versus “not installed” but I could easily do it based on genre or any number of other elements and also include any sort of sorting parameters that I might want as well. All of this seems to only take around 100 meg of memory and negligible system resources. I will say though getting everything set up initially required some manual intervention and several minutes of downloading media assets. Especially when it came to humble bundle I had to do a good deal of searching to find the specific game that was being referenced, and also a fair bit of hiding things that were not actually games. It was worth the hour or so that I spent to get things streamlined a bit.
The end result is a nice single dashboard giving you access to all of the games you have installed on your system. You can manually add games or have it search specific locations and then decide which games you are going to add manually. For Final Fantasy XIV I use the default launcher, so I had to manually add it. The only negative of all of this however is that many of the addons require you to have the official platform client installed somewhere on your system in order for the integration to work. I ran into this for example with Itch.io a client that I have never had installed before. That said the launching still works fairly seamless despite still requiring you to have the storefront-specific launchers installed on your system.
I think more than anything the thing that I enjoy the most so far is how fast I can rapidly switch between views of the games I have available. For example, I have all of these games that Twitch Prime has been giving me for years… that more or less were invisible to me. I was never going to install a dedicated client in order to play them, but thanks to Playnite and the Explorer view I can see everything that is being granted to my account by Amazon in a single location. There seems to be some weirdness with Humble Bundle though because I know for a fact that there are way more games that I have access to that are not showing up. I did notice a hide third-party games option that I probably need to tick off in order to get the rest of the humble stuff to load given that a lot of that was either tied to Steam or Origin.
I mean it isn’t perfect but it is a step closer to having a single launcher for all of the games that I have on various platforms. It also makes me realize how many games I have “entitlements” to on multiple platforms largely due to giveaways from Epic Game Store, Amazon, etc. For those with a massive backlog and that are seized by analysis paralysis… there is a random game button. That way when you are having one of those “nothing to play” moments the launcher will choose for you. It is worth a look if you were interested in GOG Galaxy but annoyed by its poor performance.