How many game launchers are on your task bar or desktop these days? I'm currently sitting on seven of them: Windows Store, Uplay, Steam, Origin, Epic Games Store, Rockstar, and Bethesda's launcher. I imagine many of you also have Battlenet, Itch.io, and maybe a few others cluttering up your desktops. It's kind of a lot!
Since last year, GOG Galaxy 2.0 has been on a mission to eliminate all the extra icons from your life and unify your various game libraries under a single client. It's been doing a pretty good job of it, too, making your games easy to access and manage, and even including your subscriptions to various game services and friends lists spread out over the different clients.
Until today, Xbox Live had been the only service to officially integrate with Galaxy, but Epic Games Store has now joined the GOG Galaxy fold as well. This isn't especially earth-shattering since the Epic Store, like other clients, already worked with Galaxy due to a community add-on. But as Galaxy keeps growing and adding features, the official integration of the Epic Store means we won't need to lean on an add-on to make sure it continues to work well with Galaxy.
"We’re excited that Epic Games Store integration has come to GOG GALAXY 2.0," said Steve Allison, General Manager of the Epic Games Store. "It’s an important step towards breaking down walls between PC stores, as it enables a unified experience for players to manage their PC games library independent of where their games were purchased."
Tim Sweeney also added his thoughts on the matter:
Ultimately, ownership of digital items should be a universal notion, independent of stores and platforms. So much of the digital world today is frustrated by powerful intermediaries whose toll booths obstruct open commerce to keep customers and their purchases locked in.July 20, 2020
That's maybe a bit rich coming from a powerful intermediary who secured a bunch of exclusive deals that made a number of games only purchasable (usually for a year) on the Epic Games Store. But then again, the reason my Epic library is so big nowadays is because of all the free games Epic gives away on a weekly basis.
I think it's probably time I actually tried out GOG Galaxy 2.0 myself, if only to clear some of those icons from my taskbar before it's completely filled up.
