Please Stop Putting Launchers In PC Games Already On Steam | Biden News

Once upon a time there was a golden age of PC gaming where you could open up Steam (or even just launch an executable yourself!), fire up a game and the next thing you’d see would be the game itself. For many large (and small) editions those days are now long gone, replaced by an era of launchers that are, at best, a nuisance.

If you want to play a Rockstar game on PC, you have to install the company’s own launcher, which starts before you play the game you clicked to play, then makes you click. another play button so you can finally play it. And that’s how it works when it works; when it’s not, you just can’t play any Rockstar games you own, sorry!

Want to play a Total War game? You get a launcher. Paradox game? Launcher. Blizzard game? Battle.net. Fortnite? Epic Games Store. An EA game? Origin. Ubisoft? Hey, guess what, you have to launch Ubisoft Connect, a launcher. Even calypso has a launcher.

Note that there are some bright spots here; Bethesda killed its own launcher earlier this year and just let Steam handle everythingand some launchers have practical advantages like letting you manage your mods (Paradox) or jump directly into a save game (Creative Assembly).

While publishers have clear reasons for dumping these things on us (from DRM to $$$), these launchers are very unpopular with gamers, partly because of the connectivity hassles (see Rockstar’s example above), but mostly because they’re just pain in the ass, speed on the way to the place you actually want to go.

Things hit a new level of absurd this week, however, with news that Kerbal Space Program—yes, the one with the little aliens building rockets—now has its own launcher for the Steam version of the game, billed as “a resource for KSP & KSP 2 Early Access news and updates.”

Given the game’s profile, the fact that it’s already launching on Steam and its reputation as a weird little indie sandbox, fan reaction was understandably negative; People get out on Steamwhile on the game reddit solutions have already been found to completely disable the launcher.

Publishers, please, we’re begging you. This is wrong. As the best comment in that Steam discussion says, “GAMES ON STEAM DON’T NEED A LAUNCHER. STEAM IS THE LAUNCHER”.