One definite advantage of Playnite: Being able to search through almost all my games in a single place when I forget which platform I bought a 1990s adventure game on. And if I'm opening all these launchers constantly anyway, I may as well just use them. I've gone back to having every launcher on my desktop and randomly opening each one at intervals just to let them download patches because, absurd as it is, this is the only way to make it possible to instantly play a game whenever I want to. There's no way around this problem, but it still dampens Playnite's appeal. It's still running each of them before running the associated games, which means any that haven't been opened for a while will have to update themselves, and sometimes the game in question, before letting me play. But within a week of installing Playnite, I've already stopped using it.īut more significantly, Playnite does nothing to alleviate the biggest problem of having multiple launchers. Also it's free, unlike some of its competitors, and I didn't notice it affecting performance in any way. Playnite also has things normal people might want, like controller support, a fullscreen equivalent to Big Picture Mode, the ability to track playtime (it imports existing playtime numbers from Steam and GOG Galaxy too), and support for themes and extensions. Fortunately for us, you can tell Playnite to pretend Thief: Deadly Shadows is called Thief 3 for the sake of order and finally exhale that breath you've been holding since 2014. I mean, I know I'm not the only one because on the internet there is always someone more precious than the fussiest person you know.

Maybe I'm the only person bugged by the way Steam files Napoleon: Total War under T but leaves Rome: Total War under R, or the way it inserts Thief Town in the middle of the Thief series, to which it's unrelated, or the way GOG puts The Witcher after The Witcher 3. Steam library filters are another external solution for an unwieldy Steam collection.

Origin launcher