I know lots of you have grown with it so that’s just the way it has always been for you and you are used to it, but older gamers, why do you need a launcher?

I’ve started PC gaming in the mid to late 90s but only when visiting cousins and friends. Got my first PC in 2001. I have some original games but I’m like 99% pirate, especially for “newer stuff” (read: anything that came out in the last 20 years lol). Modus was always the same: run the installer, click the shortcut, play.

I created a Steam account sometime in the late 2010s, I remember I did because I saw they were giving Metro games for free and I wanted to play them, and I started collecting free games that looked cool, but it really really bothered me that I needed to open their store to install and play the games. Even if I made desktop shortcuts their program would run in the background, and usually complain if I was offline… I just found everything so useless… run software to run the software I want to run, why not skip the middleman? Also I have always been on shitty hardware and I didn’t like that extra RAM consumption going on in the background.

Eventually I stopped using Steam, deleted my account, and went back to piracy, but with the loss of some trusted trackers and stuff, and me starting running banking and other important shit on the same PC, I decided to start buying games, and then I found GOG, and what a godsend store! When I buy the game I get the installer so I can do whatever I want with it, and I don’t need any third party application to install or run them.

I see a lot of people saying they don’t buy games from other stores because their launchers are shit… but what do you even need a launcher for? Not having a launcher is my requirement to buy a game lol

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    4 hours ago
    1. Games get updates far more often than they did back in the 90s and 00s. If your game is installed, it’s pushed to you automatically. If it’s not installed, the next time you install it, you’ll be on the latest version.
    2. Installing a game is passive compared to inserting the next disc, fishing out the serial key, etc. You just click download and walk away for 5 minutes. Likewise, as games are very large these days, you can easily uninstall and reinstall games on limited drive space very easily from the same UI.
    3. Cloud saves. They’re always nice to have. You can rig up something like it if you’ve got the networking and scripting know-how, but once again, it’s just passive through a launcher like Steam.
    4. There’s a lot to be said about the longevity of network multiplayer games that allow you to self host and port forward, but Steam and its ilk mean that the average person never has to learn how to do that ever, and it’s more secure for the end users for Steam to take on the burden of facilitating the connection.
    5. With things like Steam’s Big Picture Mode, you can navigate an entire library and jump from game to game with nothing but a controller.
    6. Launching a game via Proton, whether in Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, or Steam, is just easier and more automatic than not using a launcher.

    All that said, there’s a lot of value to GOG for never requiring the launcher (but they make an annoying exception for network multiplayer games).