Gog Galaxy 2.0 will feature multi-platform support for a unified game library
Valve Software's Steam, the Epic Mega Store, UbiSoft's uPlay, Electronic Arts' Origin, Gog Galaxy, the itch.io client, the Microsoft Store, Battle.net, Bethesda Launcher, and others.
The number of desktop clients for PC games exploded in recent time. While choice is good most of the time, it is exclusives and differences between the same release that makes the whole environment such a mess.
Each Store needs to be installed (with the exception of Microsoft Store and Gog Galaxy), and gamers may end up with several Store installations on their devices depending on the games they purchased. Fragmentation is an issue with each new gaming client increasing the level and practically all running on startup of the system by default.
An application to manage all games and to launch them from a dedicated interface does not exist currently. If you want to start a game, you need to either launch the game client and select the game afterwards, or activate a shortcut if it exists to start it (which will start the game client and the game).
Gog Galaxy 2.0
Gog is the first company that tries to do something about it. The upcoming Galaxy 2.0 client -- completely optional -- is an attempt to bring order into the chaos. Galaxy 2.0 includes cross-platform and cross-client game management functionality. Gog promises that users may import games from PC and consoles to manage these in a single interface.
For PC games, the company promises that users of Galaxy 2.0 may launch them directly from the program's interface regardless of the actual platform and client.
The Galaxy 2.0 client offers more than that though: Gog highlights that you may use it to keep track of game stats across platforms, that Galaxy users may bring together all their friends from all platforms, will support cross-platform chat, and will introduce an activity feed that is also cross-platform to see achievements and recent game plays of friends.
Gog Galaxy 2.0 has not been released yet. Interested users may sign-up for a place in the beta to test a development release when it gets released.
Closing Words
The only gaming client that does not require installation attempts to bring games from all other PC gaming clients under a single roof, that is quite something. Galaxy 2.0 won't do away with the requirement to install other gaming clients on the PC but it may make it a lot easier to manage all purchased and installed games.
The current client has some interesting features such as rollbacks to previous versions. You can check out our Gog Galaxy review here.
Now You: Do you have gaming clients installed on your PC?
Playnite does this and more, it also supports console emulators, etc https://playnite.link/ It’s free and open source.
I hope steam will make sg like this too.
I was surprised that all of my steam-games run on Linux (thanks to Proton) but none of them works from GoG.
Windows is dying. No one need to use it for gaming or anything else anymore. Windows is cancer.
Multi-Platfrom…except Linux. That’s just sad.
If this is true, then it’s even sadder considering a bunch of the catalog supports linux.
I’m looking forward to GOG Galaxy 2.0. It should solve quite a few nagging game-related logistics problems as you mention here. On the GOG site, I also saw some mention of 2.0 with regard to (more expanded or enhanced?) cloud saves. Not being able to save to the cloud for a number of older games — Chaser, for example — is a real pain. As a result, if I install GOG’s Chaser on two different PCs, the save states would be specific to *each* installed Chaser instance. Ugh. If there was some way to access cloud-based saves for games such as Chaser, then we could load shared saves regardless of which PC we’re using that had Chaser installed on it. Hence, those older games would suddenly become… truly mobile in a sense. THAT would be awesome for those older, beloved games available through GOG.
“Do you have gaming clients installed on your PC?”
I don’t. I used to use Steam, but stopped a number of years back.
I don’t understand what, outside of the context of a store, a game client really brings to the table. Is it more than just a program launcher?
Well, at this point they often include stuff like cloud saves (works as a reasonable layperson grade backup for saves *and* keeps things in-sync between computers without any hassle). That’s kind of the first serious problem with lack of GNU/Linux support.
Additionally, some recent games just won’t do multiplayer at all unless you have the client for whichever platform you bought the game on. I don’t remember the titles, but some of the recent-ish games that bothered to get GNU/Linux support correct managed to have a problem with this (if you bought the GOG one, no multiplayer because no GOG Galaxy because apparently GOG can’t figure out how to write a cross-platform client)
Gog Galaxy 2.0 needs only to do one thing: allow games to update witout the needs of the “original” launcher to run.
If so then all games would have one ‘process’ that keeps the game launching quickly, and removes the need for all launchet to load on Windows Start. the launcher in question would get started when starting the game and could stop with it too.
gathering all launcher-game stat’s in one interface will be a bonus for those who care about it. specially when they will be able to compare their PC stat’s vs their friends console stats.
But it won’t enable cross play, which could become confusing for some.
why on earth should any launcher launch at windows start in the 1st place? they don’t do that now unless you set them to. a steam + uplay game doesn’t require anything to start at win start. you launch steam, it updates and launch uplay.
there’s no way it doesn’t still require steam or uplay or whatever if you have games from those places. chances as it’ll just act like adding non steam games to the steam library, except more automated and adds everything rather than you doing it 1 by 1 manually.
for starters, gog isn’t going to be paying for bandwidth or hosting of games on other platforms. it also certainly can’t launch console games. it’s just a hub that launch other things when needed or logs in to multiple social networks and allow you to transfer contact lists.