GOG Galaxy 2.0 - all of your games in one App

well looks a bit ambitious , let's see if they can make it work

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/gog-galaxy-20-aims-to-bring-games-from-all-pc-and-console-platforms-under-one-roof/

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GOG Galaxy is a Steam-like client for GOG's digital storefront that's really quite good and offers the added bonus of being completely optional: You can conduct all your GOG-related business through it, or you can ignore it completely and continue downloading your games directly from the site and running them through Windows Explorer—or a DOS prompt, if you're a truly dedicated retro-type.

Galaxy 2.0, announced today, sounds like a more ambitious undertaking, as it promises to combine all of your games, online friends, and other data in one place. The idea is that you'll connect the new client to your various online accounts and platforms, including consoles—a list hasn't been confirmed yet, but a rep said that the goal is "to have all major platforms officially integrated in the app"—at w.hich point it will import your libraries and friends lists, essentially acting as a big-tent overlay for Steam, EGS, Origin, and so forth. It will also track all of your achievements and hours played across platforms, support cross-platform chat, and offer various sorting, filtering, and collection comparison options.

User data will be stored online to enable simple syncing between devices, but GOG made a point of emphasizing that privacy is paramount: It explicitly states on the Galaxy website that "we're not spying on data from your computer" and won't share it with third parties; you'll also be able to remove your imported data from Galaxy servers "with a single click."

Details are light at this point: On how you'll actually add games, for instance, an FAQ states, "In GOG Galaxy 2.0 you’re adding games through official and community created integrations. By connecting platforms, the data about the games you own is automatically imported to the application. On top of that you will also be able to manually add single games that are not connected to any platform."

And on those "community created integrations": "We want to offer integrations with all possible gaming platforms. This is a challenging and time-consuming process, not only because these are technically complex projects, but they also require negotiations and agreements with partners. We want all our official integrations to be supported by respective platform holders, so we make sure they’re in-line with partners’ policies and that they’re safe."

"While we’re hard at work on adding more official integrations, we’ve decided to give you—the community—an opportunity to work on your own open source platform integrations. We’re currently polishing the documentation that will be shared with you to help you build your own platform integrations for GOG Galaxy 2.0."

Sounds pretty great, and I really love GoG. My go-to. That being said, this sounds a bit like the beginning of the end - when the product risks becoming too big and corporate.

We'll see. I do like the unification - in sharp contrast to others that want to split my gaming up into as many little cubes as they can

Pretty sure this is just like how Uplay can allow your Steam profile to be integrated with it. It's not all controlled by one company, it's just a tunnel into other networks where you can unify everything.

I hope they can follow through with this, I've been saying for a while it'd be great to have a unified app to launch all my various games.

My only hangup is that it's one of the stores doing it; kind of wish this was some sort of independently produced apps made by a gamer or something, but whatever.

Good luck with that. Stores will go full on nuclear against it if it taps into their clients’ user data. And they’ll rewrite their EULAs if they don’t already cover the practice.

No Linux version, sad.

GOG Galaxy is pretty great as is, so this is wonderful news indeed.

I'm looking forward to this. Been taking a break from PC gaming so maybe I'll jump back on when this is available. I remember I used Playnite for the time being as my launcher; only gripe was I had to pull and use custom resolutions for the cover art.