Adventures in Linux Gaming

Last month I wrote about Playnite and GOG Galaxy 2.0. What I forgot to mention is that, for me personally, the major downside of each is the lack of Linux support.

I've been using Windows 7 for a long time. I didn't like the look of Windows 8 when it came out, and never saw the point in switching. Having used Windows 10 at work, I definitely have no interest in using it on my home PC, regardless of all the spying it supposedly does. I just don't enjoy using it. I suppose I don't particularly enjoy using Windows 7 either; I've had my share of problems with it. It just happens to be the best version of Windows which is still officially supported. Unfortunately, with that support ending at the start of next year, I would be forced to "upgrade" to a worse version of Windows if I want to continue to get security updates.

Do I really need security updates? I don't know. Is Windows 10 really worse or am I just biased? I guess it's a little of both. Ultimately, though, it probably doesn't matter. I've been somewhat unhappy with Windows in general, and... well, Linux is free.

Switching to Linux, and Why You Should, Maybe

Switching to Linux is seen by some as a daunting task, and perhaps there's good reason for those with no experience with Linux to be just a bit intimidated. To those terrified Linux beginners, I would recommend a user-friendly distribution like Linux Mint. That's what I'm using, despite several years of experience with Linux as a software engineer. It's just incredibly convenient. The Cinnamon desktop environment is fairly Windows-like, and Linux Mint comes with nearly all the features you need in order to avoid ever touching the command line if you don't want to. The installer is also very easy to use. Some casual PC users might not know what all of the options mean, but for those users, I think the defaults are probably fine.

Of course, no matter how automated the installer and how fully-featured the desktop environment, every Linux user will inevitably run into some kind of problem. The very same is true on Windows; the difference is that, when you search the internet for a solution to a problem on Windows, you'll almost certainly find a solution posted by someone who uses the same version of Windows. There are many Linux distributions, though; if you're not using one of the popular ones, you might find solutions which aren't quite what you need, or you might not even find any reliable documentation of the exact problem you're experiencing.

When I turn to the internet for help with installing something or fixing some error on Linux, the solutions I find are usually tailored to Ubuntu, which is fine because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it's not always the case. Sometimes the answers I find are all about Debian or Fedora. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Other times it does. I'm not saying that troubleshooting on Linux is a nightmare. These days, it really isn't. However, the fact that there isn't just one Linux comes with some inherent problems, such as this one, and troubleshooting does require a bit more patience.

But the fact that there are so many distributions means that, if you hit a roadblock and absolutely nothing works, you could always just try a different distribution.

How I Ended Up with Linux Mint

When I first decided to install Linux on my home computer, I tried Ubuntu. The installation process was mostly easy. I had some difficulty setting up dual-boot with Windows 7, but it wasn't Ubuntu's fault. It was because, while attempting to install Ubuntu from a USB stick, and I had inadvertently booted to my USB stick in UEFI mode while my Windows installation was using legacy BIOS. If you don't know what that means, don't feel bad; neither did I.

The short version of this story is that, when I booted my USB stick in legacy BIOS mode, the installation and dual-boot set-up went smoothly. However, I found Ubuntu's default desktop environment difficult to customize and annoying to use in general. Even after a bit of research, I couldn't figure out if my problems were the result of bugs or just obtuse design. Ultimately, for this reason and others, I decided that Ubuntu just wasn't for me.

That's when I tried installing Debian. The installation process seemed to work perfectly. Then I tried to boot to Debian, and nothing happened. I got a black screen. I did some research but there was really no way for me to try any of the solutions proposed to others who had similar problems, because I didn't even have a working terminal. I couldn't enter any commands. I assume that it was a video driver issue, and I could have attempted to fix it, but I decided that it wasn't worth my time. I had heard good things about Linux Mint, and I hadn't tried it yet, so I dropped Debian like a hot turd and started downloading Linux Mint.

That turned out to be the right decision; Linux Mint was easy to install, it booted up just fine, and to this day I've had no significant problems with it... except when trying to run games that were never meant to run on Linux.

Gaming On Linux

It always takes me a while to get to the point.

Linux Mint is great as a general-use desktop operating system. It comes with Firefox, LibreOffice, a media player, etc. But how is it for playing video games? Well, I'd say it's just as good for games as any other Linux distribution, and gaming on Linux today is better than ever, thanks in part to Steam.

Steam Play and Proton

A Linux version of the Steam client has been available since 2013, allowing Steam users to play any games which happened to have official Linux versions. It was only about a year ago, however, that Steam rolled out an update to the cross-platform Steam Play feature, allowing Windows games to be installed using the Linux client and providing a Wine-based compatibility tool called Proton which allows many of those games to run on Linux with very little effort from the user.

Installing Steam on Linux Mint doesn't require any command line usage, nor does it even require a web browser. You just open the Software Manager, search for Steam, select the first result, and click the install button. Meanwhile, enabling Steam Play for all games is just a matter of checking a box in the Steam settings menu. If I remember correctly, this option is disabled by default, and initially Steam Play is enabled only for officially supported games, which is no surprise; it's sensible for anything that isn't guaranteed to work to be disabled by default. But the option isn't hard to find, and often no effort is required to get games to work even if they're not officially supported.

ProtonDB tracks how well Steam games work with Proton by aggregating user-submitted reports. Games without native Linux support are rated on a scale of Borked (meaning it won't run at all) to Platinum (meaning it runs perfectly out-of-the-box), with three ratings (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) in between. I'll let the statistics on ProtonDB speak for themselves, but they appear to indicate that the majority of games are playable.

My own personal experience with running Steam games on Linux has been better than expected. Of course, I've been using ProtonDB as a resource since the beginning, and I haven't bothered to install games which are definitively rated Borked. In general, I've gravitated more toward the games with higher ratings. Therefore, I can't claim that the games I've tried playing on Linux via Proton, of which there are about a dozen, are a random sample. However, even when I've tried to play games rated Bronze or Silver, I've been mostly successful, as I've found solutions in ProtonDB's comments to some of the minor problems I've encountered. And the only game rated Borked which I've really gotten the urge to play since installing Linux Mint is L.A. Noire, and for such games, I still have Windows 7 installed on my other hard drive.

I won't describe my experience with every game in detail, but the first Windows-only game I played on Linux Mint was Max Payne, and... frankly, it just worked. It worked perfectly, actually. The only difficulty I had was not with the game itself but rather with the unofficial widescreen patch, and it was only a momentary setback. The comments on ProtonDB quickly set me straight; I added WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d8=n,b" %command% to the game's launch options in Steam and even the widescreen patch worked perfectly.

Similarly, Max Payne 2 works perfectly in Linux, and getting the unofficial widescreen patch to work simply requires adding WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d9=n,b" %command% to the game's launch options. Playing Max Payne 3 was a bit more difficult; initially, it wouldn't launch. Following the advice of comments on ProtonDB, I added PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1 %command% to the game's launch options, and it worked, but with some bugs. The minor issues with Max Payne 3 which remain can probably be fixed, perhaps by trying one of the other Proton versions offered by Steam or by further modifying the runtime configuration, but I had only installed it for testing purposes anyway. I was really more interested in playing the first two games in the series, so I didn't spend much time troubleshooting the third.

Non-Steam Games and Wine

Despite needing the occasional web search to find the correct configuration with which to run a certain game, Steam Play with Proton is actually so convenient it's easier than ever for me to ignore the games I bought from other online stores such as GOG. While there are games on GOG with official Linux support, the GOG Galaxy client does not have a Linux version (despite a lot of GOG users wanting one). Downloading games directly from the GOG web site isn't hard, but clients such as Steam and Galaxy do offer a lot of convenience.

Furthermore, although I could probably use Wine or other tools to play many of the Windows-only games from my GOG account on Linux, it would require more effort than running Windows games via Steam, which very often just works automatically. I did install Wine with the intention of playing non-Steam Windows games, but I just haven't used it yet, because Proton — when it works, which it usually does — is just so effortless. If I'm trying to decide what to play, and I've narrowed down my choices to one GOG game and one Steam game, I'm likely to pick whichever is easiest to run on Linux, and that's going to be the Steam game nine times out of ten.

That might change a bit when I get around to trying Lutris, a game client not associated with any particular store, which also claims to reduce installation of many Windows games on Linux to a zero-effort, one click process. It looks like a promising solution for playing some of my GOG games on Linux. For what it's worth, though, installing Lutris is one extra step. I'm going to have to be a jerk and say that Steam still makes it easier by having Proton integration built in to its own client. So many of my games were already working on Linux as soon as I installed Steam that I haven't taken the time to use much of anything else.

So I don't have much to say about running Windows games with Wine, via Lutris or otherwise. I plan on experimenting with it eventually, and once I've done so, I'll probably write a sequel to this post. Right now, though, I'm looking at a huge Steam library and a high success rate with using Proton with very little tweaking, so I probably won't be straying away from Steam very often, except for the sake of experimentation. When I just want to play a game, Proton is often the best way to make it happen.

The Classics

There is one category of games for which I've already strayed outside the Steam bubble: Old-school shooters. I've got to have them.

The Steam versions of The Ultimate DOOM, DOOM II: Hell on Earth, Final DOOM, Heretic, HeXen: Beyond Heretic, and HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel all run in Proton. They were all, in fact, officially tested by Valve with specific versions of Proton, so that they show up in my Steam library with labels like "Proton [version number] selected by Valve testing" and will run with the indicated Proton version instead of the default I selected in the global Steam settings.

I find this rather amusing because the Steam versions of these games run through DOSBox which, if I'm not mistaken, has a Linux version. However, I'm not suprised that the game's publisher, id Software, hasn't made the effort to repackage these old games with the Linux version of DOSBox for an official Linux release on Steam, especially given that most users who are computer-savvy enough to use Linux will just take the game files downloaded via Steam and run them in a source port instead of DOSBox anyway.

That's what I did with all of these games, immediately after installing them. There's a Linux version of GZDoom, which isn't a suitable source port for anyone who wants the games to run exactly as they did in the '90s, but it's good enough for me. Like any sane person, I did disable major gameplay options which were not in the original games (such as vertical freelook in the DOOM games, jumping in DOOM and Heretic, and ridiculous stuff like crouching), but the graphical upgrades don't bother me.

Getting GZDoom to launch with the correct options for each game was a bit of a hassle, but no more than it was on Windows. The only real problem is that GZDoom, on my system, encounters some kind of error when I close it, which might have something to do with the fact that it doesn't seem to save changes to the gzdoom.ini file unless I enter the writeini console command while running GZDoom. Knowing the workaround, I'm not really bothered by it.

Satisfied with the DOOM and Heretic/HeXen games, I moved on to Wolfenstein 3D and its expansion Spear of Destiny, and installed the source port ECWolf. To my surprise, it seems to work perfectly despite being, in my estimation, less widely used than GZDoom. So then I moved on to the Marathon trilogy, available as freeware since 2005, and attempted to install the source port, Aleph One. That, unfortunately, could have gone more smoothly.

Not Everything is User-Friendly

The official Aleph One web site has some pretty basic instructions for installing the Linux version: Unpack the .tar.bz2 file and, in the unpacked directory, run ./configure && make && make install. Unpacking the file was easy, but I started having problems as soon as I ran the configure command. I won't bother going into all of the messy details, but I went through several iterations of trying the installation, which would fail due to missing dependencies, and then installing those dependencies.

Synaptic Package Manager, included in Linux Mint, makes finding and installing missing packages about as easy as it can be; doing it on the command line using apt or apt-get isn't very hard either. But I had never needed to hunt down dependencies like this. When installing software through Linux Mint's Software Manager, or even when installing a program using apt install, all dependencies are installed automatically (which I now regard as a miracle). Installing software manually, however, isn't quite so easy. Perhaps I was to blame for not knowing what all of the dependencies were beforehand, but it was getting frustrating.

When I finally got Aleph One installed, I was able to launch Marathon, but it printed some errors to the screen and there was no HUD. Searching the internet for a solution, it turned out I was still missing some "optional" dependencies, and installing those made things worse; my next attempt at installing Aleph One failed outright, seemingly due to a dependency which I had already installed.

That's when a comment on the Aleph One GitHub repository, posted only eight minutes before I saw it, clued me in to the fact that I had gone down the wrong rabbit hole. The easier and more reliable way to install Aleph One is to clone the Git repo, go into the root level folder, and run ./autogen.sh followed by make and make install. I had to install git (which I've used extensively but not at home) and I was still missing a couple of dependencies required by the autogen.sh script, but it told me exactly what the dependencies were, so installing them was just a matter of running the correct sudo apt install command.

So I've got Marathon and its sequels working on Linux now, but installing Aleph One took more than an hour after all was said and done. I've learned a lot, though, and ultimately the solution to every problem was revealed with a simple internet search. This story could scare people away from trying to play games on Linux, but it's important to keep in mind that I had this much trouble only because I was trying to play a 25-year-old game. Doing that on Windows isn't always easy either.

I still haven't installed the classic Quake games, and I think those are next. I can only hope installing their source ports will be a bit easier.

Conclusion

I guess the moral of this story is that installing and running games on Linux can take a bit of patience, but I only came close to running out of patience when I tried to do things that only an old-school game enthusiast determined to use Linux at all costs would ever try to do. With Steam, many of the games that work on Linux will "just work" and, for non-Steam games, I'm told that Wine isn't very hard to use either. However, I do know just enough about Wine to know that it requires some effort. The average consumer expects things to work with a single mouse click. They want one-click install and one-click launch of every game.

For games with native Linux support, you can have that. For the rest, Steam comes pretty close to providing that level of convenience. Until other stores like GOG implement some kind of compatibility layer like Proton into their own clients, Steam will dominate Linux gaming for the same reason that Windows dominates gaming in general: It's just easier.

GOG Galaxy 2.0 and Playnite 5.3

Note: Some of the information in this post is outdated now. Deal with it, nerds.

Last Friday, I finally got my invitation to the GOG Galaxy 2.0 closed beta. This major update to digital PC game distributor GOG's optional desktop client allows users to import information about games purchased from or registered to other services, thus providing a unified front end for divided game collections. The point, presumably, is to address or to mitigate some game consumers' reluctance to stray outside of the Steam bubble due to their anxiety about not having all of their games in one place. As I noted in a previous post, this is a pretty smart move for GOG, because most potential GOG customers are probably using Steam already, and might not be willing to start using a second store unless doing so is made convenient.

It should be noted that, while GOG Galaxy 2.0 will allow you to import your Steam game library and launch those games from within Galaxy, the games are still launched through Steam, so having the Steam client installed is still required to play Steam games. The same goes for other services as well. The new Galaxy launcher isn't going to let you avoid installing other launchers. However, it will help you organize your game collection and see all of your games in one place without opening all of your launchers at once. Much of the functionality added in this Galaxy update will seem familiar to users of Playnite, another desktop application which aims to be an all-in-one game launcher but which isn't associated with a particular store.

On that note, Playnite 5.0, a substantial update, just recently came out of beta. I believe this was an open beta, but I never got around to trying it during the beta phase. The official release of Playnite 5.0 was announced on Twitter last Friday, the same day I got my GOG Galaxy 2.0 invite.

Big Playnite 5 update is now available! https://t.co/nOh6UVBnja

— Playnite (@AppPlaynite) July 26, 2019

Since then, several minor versions have been released; the latest version of Playnite is now 5.3 as of today. Apparently some nasty bugs were fixed — some users reported that their game collection databases didn't survive the upgrade to 5.0, an issue which should now be resolved according to the change logs — so I guess I should be glad that I waited.

I've been waiting for weeks to try GOG Galaxy 2.0, and I've been looking forward to the big Playnite update as well, and I had planned to give my first impressions on each in separate posts. However, having installed both on the same day, I might as well do a single combined post with some comparison. This isn't really a "Galaxy versus Playnite" post — trying to pick a "winner" here wouldn't really be fair because Galaxy 2.0 is still in beta and because Playnite is an open-source application without the backing of a well-known game developer — but I'm interested to see how the two of them differ.

GOG Galaxy 2.0

I already had GOG Galaxy installed on my computer, with a few games downloaded. The GOG Galaxy 2.0 installer, as expected, seems to have replaced the old Galaxy with the new one. I'm not sure if there's any easy way to roll back to the previous version, but nothing appears to have broken. Upon starting up the new version (which is apparently 2.0.4 as of today), I'm still logged in and my entire collection of GOG games is visible; the few games I had installed are still showing up as installed, and I was able to launch one of them.

More importantly, to my delight, it didn't automatically attempt to detect and import games from Steam, etc., that I've installed on my computer. Maybe some people would like everything to be automatic like this, but it would have really annoyed me; I'd much rather choose whether to import games from other services, and when to do so.

However, when I was ready to import some non-GOG games into Galaxy, I found that simply scanning for installed games, or manually importing them, apparently cannot be done. The fact that Galaxy didn't try to look for installed non-GOG games on my computer makes perfect sense because importing games requires connecting accounts. The inability to manually add games by their .exe files is listed as a known issue in GOG's support center, so I assume this is meant to change at some point in the future — as it should, because Playnite and Steam both allow manually adding arbitrary games — but, as of now, it seems the only way to add non-GOG games to Galaxy 2.0 is to use the platform integrations in the settings menu.

Two official integrations are listed:

• GOG.com (connected by default of course)
• Xbox Live

 Meanwhile, five are listed under "popular" community integrations:

• Epic Games Store
• Origin
• PlayStation Network
• Steam
• Uplay

A third section exists to add manual integrations, but I'm not sure how to do this yet. The section contains only a "learn more" link which leads to the Galaxy integrations Python API, and that page includes instructions for deploying integrations into the Galaxy client, but I can find no directory of community plugins aside from the five "popular" ones listed above. Perhaps no others exist yet.

In any case, I love the fact that the API is in Python, because Python is a wonderful language, and if I weren't already using Python every day at work then I might be tempted to try creating my own Galaxy plugins. Of all the languages I've used, Python is by far the most accessible, so it's a good choice for community-made extensions to the Galaxy client.

As for using the integrations which are currently available, it doesn't seem too difficult. Each one listed in the settings menu has a big purple "connect" button which automatically downloads the integration and displays a window indicating which features are included in the integration. These features, one or more of which are implemented by each integration, are as follows:

• Games
• Library
• Installing & Launching
• Achievements
• Game time
• Friends
• Friends list
• Chat
• Friend recommendations

The Steam integration currently implements all of these features except for friends list and chat. In comparison, the Origin integration implements the same set of features as the Steam integration, while the Uplay integration is missing achievements and the Epic Games Store integration is missing achievements and game time. All of this could change in the future, given that Galaxy 2.0 is still in beta, but I don't really care; none of the features missing from any of these integrations are actually features that matter to me. (Friends list integration might be nice, but nearly all of my friends only use Steam anyway, so I'll just go directly to Steam if I want to talk to them.)

From that informational window, clicking "connect" again brings up a log-in page for the platform in question. Apparently log-in credentials for other services are never saved in GOG Galaxy 2.0, so it probably works similarly to Playnite in which each platform's log-in window is basically a browser window and the application only stores some kind of log-in session cookie.

The GOG Galaxy 2.0 privacy notice also seems to indicate that the data enabling each account integration connection is deleted once the integration is disconnected, which seems to imply that there is no permanent account linkage. I assume this means, for example, that GOG will not permanently link my Uplay account to my GOG account if I use the Uplay integration, and will not prevent me from connecting to another Uplay account in the future if I happen to have two Uplay accounts. If this is the case, it would differ from GOG Connect in which Steam account linkage is permanent and irreversible, but the reason for GOG Connect working this way is obvious.

In any case, given that I've already used GOG Connect and my Steam account is therefore permanently linked to my GOG account already, I saw no danger in using GOG Galaxy 2.0's Steam integration.

Upon entering my Steam account credentials (and the Steam Guard authentication code), Galaxy automatically began importing my entire Steam library, which took several minutes because I have several hundred games on Steam. It did not give me the option, as Playnite would, to import only installed games. I suppose that's fine, though. Importing my entire Steam library just happens to be what I wanted to do anyway.

The end result was quite nice, visually. GOG Galaxy 2.0 has two modes for displaying games: a list view and a grid view. The latter is the default, and is more interesting anyway, so it's what I spent most of my time using. All of my Steam games were seamlessly added to the same grid as my GOG games, with all games from both services displaying cover art of the same size and shape. At first glance, this looks a bit nicer than Playnite 4.74, which would download each game's cover art from one of a few sources (depending on availability and user settings) but would not ensure uniform aspect ratio of cover art; this can result in a messy-looking library. If I remember correctly, the last version of Launchbox that I used had the same problem.

However, while GOG Galaxy does its best to display box art of uniform dimensions, sometimes the result is far from perfect. All of the images are guaranteed to line up perfectly, but that's because some of the images are cropped to achieve the desired dimensions. In some cases, wide images are cropped to narrow box art shape, resulting in only part of a title being shown. This can be demonstrated, quite annoyingly, by the Alien Breed trilogy imported from my Steam library (which are also being shown in the wrong order, presumably due to the alphanumeric ordering of special characters such as spaces and colons):

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in GOG Galaxy 2.0.

The lack of suitable cover art for some games isn't GOG's fault, but the cropping is an issue nonetheless. Compare this to the way Playnite 4.74 would display these games. It seems to use the same images as Galaxy, but it shows the entirety of the wide image instead of cropping it. Whether the cropping seen in Galaxy is better or worse is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in Playnite 4.74.

Note that Playnite also displays the games the correct order because Playnite allows each game to be given an invisible sorting title (which, for the first game in the trilogy, I changed from Alien Breed: Impact to Alien Breed 1: Impact). This would be a good addition for Galaxy.

Another problem affecting both applications — but seemingly affecting Galaxy more, perhaps due to a narrower search for images — is the occasional missing box art for some of the more obscure games. For these games, Galaxy just displays the title in a box-art-shaped gray area. Fortunately, images can be added or changed manually, so the missing or otherwise incorrect box art can be fixed with a bit of effort.

As expected, games which I own on both Steam and GOG (of which there are quite a few thanks to GOG Connect) now appear twice in my Galaxy library. (This is the same behavior seen in Playnite after importing games from both Steam and GOG.) It's not a big deal, but I would have liked these entries to be combined, so that I see only one of each box art but still retain the option to launch each game on either platform. To be honest, I'm not sure if I trust any application to pull this off automatically, given the occasional minor spelling differences between platforms for the same titles (e.g., Brutal Legend from GOG versus Brütal Legend from Steam), but even in these edge cases, Galaxy does seem to find the right box art for both copies. Anyway, although seeing two of the same box art for games owned on two platforms can be slightly annoying, it's no obstacle to usability. Hovering the mouse over any box art displays the logo of the source platform as well as the game's title.

Overall, I was pleased with the way things were going, so I decided to dive in completely and connect my Uplay, Origin, and Epic Games Store accounts to Galaxy as well. All games on these accounts were automatically imported to Galaxy as the accounts were connected. In the case of Uplay, in particular, this shows one distinct advantage of Galaxy 2.0 over Playnite; the latter, as of now, can only import Uplay games that are already installed on the computer.

Galaxy was able to find suitable box art for all of my Uplay, Origin, and Epic titles, which don't include nearly as many obscure games as my Steam library. So, aside from some box art issues with a number of Steam games for which Galaxy was apparently able to find only wide images which were then badly cropped, my combined GOG/Steam/Uplay/Origin/Epic game collection in Galaxy 2.0 looks pretty nice.

Each game's metadata can be modified, and this includes several text fields (title, genres, developers, publishers, release date, and tags), three types of images (box art tile, background image, and a small icon for list view), and some other special fields (a rating out of five stars and a checkbox for visibility which allows games to be hidden).

Playnite 5.3

I suppose I should start with a general description of Playnite for those who have never used it. In short, Playnite can import games from various PC game platforms in the same way that GOG Galaxy 2.0 does. It comes with a number of importer extensions which are similar to Galaxy's integrations. The list of importers does not seem to have changed between 4.74 and 5.3:

• Battle.net
• Bethesda
• Epic Store
• GOG
• itch.io
• Origin
• Steam
• Twitch
• Uplay

The importers for Bethesda and Uplay are the least useful, as they can only import games which are currently installed. The others can import games which aren't installed yet. The importers for Battle.net, Epic, itch.io, Origin, and Twitch accomplish this by authenticating with the user's accounts on those platforms. The importers for Steam and GOG are the most feature-rich, and can import games with or without user authentication; in the latter case, the importer requires only a username, but the user's online profile on the applicable platform needs to be made public.

In addition to importing games from each of these platforms, Playnite allows users to add games manually with a fairly high level of customization. Playnite can also launch games using emulators, although I haven't used this feature myself.

The metadata tracked for each game by Playnite includes a large number of general text fields (name, sorting name, platform, genre, developer, publisher, category, tag, release date, series, age rating, region, source, version, user score, critic score, community score, and description), a handful of advanced fields (last played, time played, play count, completion status, "hidden" and "favorite" checkboxes, etc.), three types of images (cover image, background image, and icon), and some other cool options. Playnite can attempt to populate most of these fields automatically by downloading metadata from various sources; doing this automatically after importing games is optional.

Unlike GOG Galaxy 2.0, no log-in is required by Playnite itself, which is not associated with any online store. In fact, there is no such thing as a Playnite account. All of the game data imported by Playnite is stored locally by default. The database location can be changed to a flash drive to make it portable, and apparently it can even be set up to sync with a cloud service like Google Drive (although I've never tried it), but otherwise all of your data will just stay on your computer.

My own Playnite database was only stored locally, so I was concerned about reports of databases being broken by the upgrade from 4.74 to 5.0, but my database seemed intact after I updated Playnite from 4.74 to 5.3 via the "Check for Updates" option in the menu. Either the bug was fixed somewhere between 5.0 or 5.3, or it wouldn't have affected me anyway.

The visual differences between Playnite 4.74 and Playnite 5.3, which are naturally the first differences I saw, are not quite as dramatic as I had expected. I was intially somewhat disoriented by the filter options being moved from a left-hand sidebar to a right-hand sidebar, but it can be switched back to the left-hand side in the layout settings which also control the positions of a couple of other panels. The overall design of Playnite didn't change so much that I didn't know how to use it; all of the familiar things are still where they were, but there are some new additions, like an "explorer" panel which makes filtering by platform slightly easier.

I did notice immediately after the update that the "grid" view, which displays games as a grid of cover art images, was now behaving more like GOG Galaxy 2.0 than like Playnite 4.74, i.e., images were being cropped to fit the cover art dimensions:

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in Playnite 5.3 with "uniform to fill" cover art rendering.

However, the cover art rendering can be changed in the settings. The target aspect ratio can be modified, as can spacing and border settings, and there are four stretch modes:

• None (which does no resizing or stretching, so images are shown at their original sizes and aspect ratios regardless of whether they fit in the available grid space, thus sometimes resulting in grid spaces showing only the center of a game's cover art and other times resulting in images filling only part of the available grid spaces; not recommended but, hey, it's an option)
• Fill (which disregards images' original sizes and aspect ratios, and just stretches them to fill the target size and aspect ratio of the grid)
• Uniform (which resizes images to fit inside the grid spaces while maintaining their aspect ratios; this was the behavior of Playnite 4.74)
• Uniform to Fill (which resizes images to fill the grid spaces while maintaining their aspect ratios, and then crops them as needed to meet the target aspect ratio; this is the default behavior of Playnite 5.3)

I think these are probably all of the image fitting options anyone could want, which is great. Personally, I can't tolerate stretching or cropping, so I've gone back to the "Uniform" setting used by Playnite 4.74:

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in Playnite 5.3 with "uniform" cover art rendering.

This may result in a messier looking grid view, but it avoids messing up the individual images. I suppose there's no setting in which the automatically downloaded Alien Breed 3 image is truly suitable cover art, and it's a shame that this image was chosen by both Playnite and GOG Galaxy 2.0, but in either case, I can just manually replace the image if it bothers me enough.

I suppose the bottom line is that Playnite 5.3 offers more visual customization options than Playnite 4.74. However, being pretty isn't really enough; Playnite needs to be functional as well. It already worked rather well in version 4.74, but it had its bugs, quirks, and shortcomings. I'm sure Playnite 5.3 still has plenty of bugs and quirks, even if I haven't seen them, but at least one notable functional shortcoming has been resolved: filters are improved.

Whereas most filters in Playnite 4.74 were simple text searches — which meant, for example, that one could not filter to games with the genre "Adventure" without also finding games with the genre "Action/Adventure" — the filters in Playnite 5.3 provide drop-down menus for each category, while also retaining the text search option. The ability to select "Action" without also selecting "Action/Adventure" might seem like a very minor thing, and I suppose it is, but being able to select from a drop-down menu instead of typing a genre name is also just convenient in general.

Conclusion

As noted above, I'm not really looking for a winner here. They both work. They're both good. They both have shortcomings as well. At this time, GOG Galaxy 2.0 does not seem to have integrations for all of the same platforms from which Playnite can import games; if there are Galaxy integrations for Battle.net, Bethesda, itch.io, and Twitch, I don't know where to find them (although, to be fair, they'll likely be added later). Meanwhile, Playnite does not have importers for Xbox or Playstation accounts (although, to be fair, the value in console game importers for a PC game launcher is rather limited unless emulation is involved).

Selection of plugins aside, the main reason to use Playnite over GOG Galaxy 2.0 is that Playnite still has more options. More of the game metadata is editable, there are more filtering and sorting options, there are more visual customization options, games can be added manually (including those not connected to any online service, e.g., games installed from discs), and games can be launched using emulators. Launch options and other actions for games can be fully customized as well, and I've used this feature to add menu items for opening specific games' manuals and README files, among other things.

Meanwhile, there are already some compelling reasons to use GOG Galaxy 2.0, even if you're not interested in the Xbox or PlayStation integrations. Being able to import achievements from various platforms will be a big deal for a lot of players (though not for me personally), and the idea of integrated friends lists and chat across platforms (though not currently implemented for any of the integrations I tried) is honestly pretty cool. If all of your friends are on Steam then maybe Playnite's dedicated button to open just the Steam friends list is good enough for you, as it is for me, but that doesn't mean GOG shouldn't aim higher.

I can't reiterate enough that GOG Galaxy 2.0 is still in closed beta, and we should expect to see more improvements by the time it officially launches. The fact that it already has some neat features that are absent from Playnite is impressive. However, the fact remains that Playnite has a considerable head start when it comes to actual game collection management options, and Galaxy has a lot of catching up to do before Playnite is made obsolete. It's possible that some of Playnite's features will never be adopted by Galaxy, and vice versa, so we might never reach a point where one is strictly better than the other. We'll just have to wait and see.

On Game Launchers

If you're a consumer of PC games and you're not clinging desperately to the past, you probably have a Steam account. Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform may have been controversial, when it was first established in 2003 and when the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 launched using Steam for DRM toward the end of the following year — for, at the time, PC games were still most commonly sold on discs, and the thought of digital distribution overtaking physical media was anathema — but over the past decade-and-a-half, those who were resistant to digital distribution in general, and to Steam in particular, have either changed their minds, accepted defeat, or abandoned PC games as a hobby. Digital distribution won, and Steam cornered the market.

Digital Distribution: Deal With It

Of course, some still refuse to use Steam, and some even refuse to pay for digital distribution (whether that means missing out on most PC games or getting them illegally). Among those who do use Steam, however, many believe that the leading PC game store has justified its place at the top, if not earned it outright. As a store and as a download client, Steam is pretty solid; Steam sales are famous for a reason, and the Steam client is a prime example of why digital distribution really isn't that bad.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the good old days when games came on discs. I especially remember entering product keys, manually downloading and installing patches, and needing to put the disc back into the computer every time I wanted to play certain games. Modern digital distribution eliminates these particular nuisances. In many ways, having a fully digital game collection is just more convenient than having a shelf full of discs, so it's no surprise that so many of us have forgiven the fact that we don't really own the games we buy from digital distributors. If Steam ever goes belly up, we will all lose our Steam libraries — but in the meantime, at least Steam games have one-click installation and automatic updates.

Steam's other features help too. Some of them have come to be fairly common in game launchers, such as friends lists and achievements. Others are less common and, when brought together in one (slightly bloated but still user-friendly) package, they make Steam a pleasure to use, even in comparison to other digital distribution clients. Among the Steam client features I've used personally are user reviews, cloud saves, family sharing, in-home streaming, profile customization, group chat, voice chat, an in-game overlay with a web browser, community forums, user-submitted guides for each game, a system for sharing user-created mods, and the ability to add non-Steam games to the Steam interface. (There's also that community market on which you can sell those silly trading cards for store credit, or buy cards if you actually want them for some reason, but I think most causal Steam users ignore that.)

In summary, what was once an annoying launcher for a mid-2000s first-person shooter has become something actually useful that we don't mind having installed. But Steam isn't the only digital distribution platform for games. It's just the biggest. What about the other platforms? Are they worth using?

Everything in One Place

If you just think of each digital distribution platform as a store, it's easy to justify straying from Steam to buy games elsewhere. Whenever you want to buy something, you should at least compare prices on a few different stores. (PC games are no exception; if a game is sold in more than one place, Steam isn't guaranteed to have the best price for any given game at any given moment.) However, a digital distributor is not just a store. It's also an online repository for all the stuff you bought from the store.

Maybe this doesn't matter if you manage to avoid ever downloading anything twice, but digital content is ephemeral and disappears if you press the wrong button, so you might need to download it again. Doing so will require logging in to the account you created at the store from which you bought your digital product. Shopping around and always buying from whichever store has the lowest price on a given thing seems like a good idea, but if you end up using a dozen different stores to buy games then you'll need to keep track of a dozen different accounts in order to maintain access to all of your games.

Most major digital distributors also make you use their client software to download, install, and launch your games, so buying and downloading games from multiple digital retailers also means installing multiple launchers. (GOG is one of a few exceptions, as their games are DRM-free and thus their Galaxy launcher is optional, but if you buy games from Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, and the Epic Games store, you'll need the respective launchers if you actually want to play those games.) Are we okay with having two launchers installed? How about having three or four of them?

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, but a lot of people don't like it. Some see all launchers as bloatware (and would prefer direct downloads of DRM-free games, as from stores like GOG). Others appreciate the convenience of a launcher, but believe this convenience is greatly diminished as the number of launchers increases. The latter view is actually more common, as most of us have accepted the futility of trying to build a fully DRM-free PC game collection in the digital distribution era, and just want to settle for the next best thing: an entire game collection consolidated on exactly one launcher.

I can absolutely see the appeal of it. Having all of your games in one place keeps your collection organized, and gives you one-click access to every game without logging in to more than one online service. On the other hand, you're also ensuring that you'll lose absolutely everything if you lose access to that one account. Those of us who use more than one platform, on the other hand, would at least have something left if we lost our Steam accounts. Maybe it's a good idea to diversify your game collection instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam going permanently offline is very hypothetical, as there's no indication that it will happen in the near future; and individual accounts being banned, stolen, or otherwise lost is extremely unlikely unless the account's owner does something very wrong — but all of these things are still possible.

For what it's worth, if had to tie my entire game collection to one launcher, I would choose Steam as well, and not just because it's the most feature-rich and fully developed platform. Unfortunately for its competitors, Steam's main two advantages: the most games and the most users. The appeal of the latter is obvious; your friends are more likely to be on Steam than on any other digital distribution platform. (GOG Galaxy has a friends list too but, for me, it's empty.) Meanwhile, Steam having the most games tells its users that they don't need to go anywhere else, even if they don't really mind creating accounts on other sites and having their game collections split across multiple libraries, and those who do want to limit themselves to one account and one launcher would be crazy not to choose the platform with the largest number of games for sale.

Competition versus Convenience

So competitors with no hope of competing with the volume of Steam's catalog need to find another way to stand out. GOG has its own niche, specializing mostly in selling old games updated for modern systems and selling them DRM-free. Humble Bundle also sells some DRM-free games (in addition to lots of Steam keys) and, as the name implies, still specializes in limited-time indie game bundles (even though the site has long had a full-time store). Both GOG and Humble also describe themselves as curated in order to differentiate their offerings from Steam's nauseatingly long list of games.

Some other digital distribution platforms might not even be considered direct competitors to Steam, as they act primarily as single-publisher stores — namely Blizzard's Battle.net, Ubisoft's Uplay, and EA's Origin. Playing games which are exclusive to these platforms or require their DRM is really the only reason to use them, but people do use them. These stores don't need to be better platforms than Steam, because they know customers will be drawn in by the few popular games over which they have exclusive control.

Steam's newest and most controversial competitor, the Epic Games store, is similar to Uplay and Origin in that it clearly intends to thrive on exclusive games as opposed to trying to create a better user experience than what is offered by Steam. What makes Epic Games controversial is that they're not content to have exclusive control over the games they publish. They've been spending a massive amount of money on exclusivity deals for other companies' games, essentially paying those companies not to do business with Steam. This isn't a new tactic, but they've used it on games which were days away from release on Steam, as well as games which were crowdfunded with the expectation of a Steam release. The fact that Tencent (and thus, allegedly, China itself) owns 40% of Epic Games doesn't help its popularity, nor does the fact that the Epic Games store and client are so pathetically bare-bones in terms of features because Epic Games is more interested in buying exclusivity than improving the user experience, nor does the fact that Epic Games' recent "Epic Mega Sale" was such a poorly planned disaster that some publishers pulled their games.

I started writing this post because the dominance of Steam, the (often exaggerated) rise of Epic Games, and the benefits of a single consolidated game library versus the need for competition among retailers seem to be hot topics lately. In particular, I've noticed an increase in complaints about PC gamers needing too many launchers to play all of the games they want to play. These complaints often boil down to frustration over games not being released on Steam; the "no Steam, no buy" crowd has always existed, but now it seems to me that they're either more numerous or more vocal. Either way, it's clearly a backlash against Epic Games, driven largely by the company's recent attempts to strongarm its way to the forefront of PC game retail.

Epic Games has done some nice things, both for consumers (like the ongoing spree of free giveaways), and for developers (like taking a smaller revenue cut than many other stores), but they've doubled down so hard on the one thing that pisses people off — buying exclusivity for games that were already advertised on other stores — that it's hard to see their negative reputation as undeserved. And yet, despite their credibility being in the trash, there are people who defend Epic in online debates — vicious Epic-versus-Steam debates which, of course, tend to frame the issue as if we each need to choose exactly one store from which to buy our PC games. I don't agree with that premise, but I'm not in a hurry to give Epic Games any money either, given their business practices. The pro-Epic side often cites healthy competition between companies as a good thing for consumers, but I'm not sure how much that really applies when Epic's main strategy thus far has been to take away consumers' choices regarding where to buy certain popular games. Boycotts rarely work, but I must say I'm inclined not to buy any Epic exclusives.

Epic does have a chance with me, though, if the company can stop acting like a super villain for five minutes. Each of Steam's other competitors has found its place in my game collection by doing what they do best. I made a GOG account for the DRM-free games, a Humble Bundle account for their bundles, and a Uplay account because I wanted to play some Ubisoft games, and an Origin account because I bought some Origin-exclusive games. I even have an Epic account, not because they bought exclusive distribution rights for a game I wanted to play, but because (as noted above) they've given away a bunch of free games and I figured I might as well grab them. So congratulations, Epic, you got your foot in the door. Now find a niche that isn't "games whose publishers were paid to stay away from Steam" and you might really have my attention.

Of course, getting me to create an account is the first hurdle, and getting me to install the desktop client is the second. I haven't installed Epic's launcher, because I currently have enough games to play without the free ones they gave me, but I do have GOG Galaxy and Uplay installed on my PC right now. I don't see why it's a bad thing to have more than one installed. The vast majority of my games are still on Steam, so the other launchers are more seldom used, but having them on my hard drive doesn't bother me. Neither does having my game collection split across multiple services, although I realize that's simply a matter of personal preference.

Solutions

The only real problem I've had with using multiple services is that sometimes I forget which games I own. I'm really, honestly, not kidding. Part of the problem is that I buy so many cheap games that my backlog is large enough for me to forget what's in it, but the inability to see all of my games in one library can turn forgetfulness into wastefulness. When Steam had its summer sale last year, I almost bought Oxenfree and Beyond Good and Evil before realizing that I already had both games, on GOG and Uplay, respectively. I hadn't remember purchasing them because I had gotten both in free giveaways, and I hadn't played them when I got them simply because I was too busy. Not seeing them in my most frequently used PC game launcher, I forgot I ever had them.

Given that I had acquired these games on GOG and Uplay precisely because those stores had given them away for free, whereas both games still cost money on Steam, I don't think using only Steam would have been the right solution. Besides, it's too late for that now. To keep better track of what's in my Steam library in the future, I've started using Playnite, which can automatically import games from various accounts — Battle.net, Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Origin, Steam, Twitch, and Uplay — and act as a front-end for all of those launchers, with the ability to install, launch, and uninstall games. It has some limitations, such as the fact that the current version can only import Uplay games which are already installed (whereas it can import all owned games from other platforms), but it's still pretty nice.

Playnite has been criticized as being simply one more launcher, and thus an unsuitable solution to the problem of having too many launchers. For those who take that point of view, the ability to import all of their games into one of the launchers they're already using would be a better solution. Steam users can import non-Steam games into the Steam client, but that's a manual process, so it's worthless if you have a lot of non-Steam games. The upcoming GOG Galaxy 2.0, a major update to the existing GOG Galaxy launcher, will do much better by including many of the same features as Playnite. This is a pretty smart move for GOG, because many of the people using GOG Galaxy are using it as a secondary launcher alongside Steam. I, for one, don't open GOG Galaxy nearly as often as Steam, but maybe GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be my go-to launcher after I import all of my Steam games into it. It might even make Playnite obsolete.

If GOG Galaxy 2.0 catches on, then there might be a day when every major store's launcher can automatically import games from users' accounts on every other major store. Of course, GOG Galaxy 2.0 will still launch Steam games through Steam and so on, so we'd still need all of our launchers installed in order to make any use of such features.

Conclusions

I've already acknowledged that I think Steam is rather nice while the Epic Games store is, in some ways, obnoxiously bad. However, I'm pretty sure I don't need to choose one. If I really want to play some game that's only on the Epic Games store, I don't need to delete my Steam account in order to play it. Take that simple fact and apply it to every rational consumer, and you'll come to the conclusion that the "Epic versus Steam" debates often miss (intentionally, I'm sure, for the sake of sensationalism): Even if Epic Games' giveaways and exclusive games convince every Steam user to create an Epic Games store account, Steam still won't go out of business. There's really no reason to get so worked up over it.

If you like old games, indie games, or DRM-free games, you likely have a GOG or Humble account (and if you don't, you should). If you happen to like certain Ubisoft or EA games, you probably have a Uplay or Origin account. You might even have an Epic account now, as well, if you noticed the 17 games they've given away for free this year. I have accounts on all of these stores for various reasons. So my game collection is fractured, spread across multiple services, but it saves me the trouble of agonizing over whether a game is available on, or cheapest on, my one service of choice.