Why all PC gamers should use GOG Galaxy 2.0

If you are a PC gamer, there is an application that you should definitely have on your hard drive:

GOG Galaxy 2.0.
This program offers the best way to organize all the games.

There are at least seven major online game stores in total, all competing for your credit card.

epic
offers every week

free games here
on.

Steam
regularly holds sales where games are heavily discounted. and

Xbox Game Pass from Microsoft for PC
(1 euro the first month, then 10 euros/month) offers you dozens of “free” games, which you can play with a monthly subscription.

Keeping an overview of all games is difficult at some point. In most cases, each online game store offers its own app for purchasing, downloading, and authenticating games, and each game you’ve downloaded is stored in the store’s digital “library.” If you want to remember which games you bought or downloaded from each store, you have to click and look at each one individually. Who has time for that? As a result, many choose just one or two stores and ignore the rest, which means you miss out on a lot of deals.

With GOG Galaxy 2.0, everything changes. It’s About Store, an app that connects to all other stores and allows you to group all the games you own into one common space. Do you want to play Far Cry 3? Then you no longer have to wonder if the game is in your library on Steam or Ubisoft. Just click on the title icon and you can start playing right away.

To be fair, GOG Galaxy 2.0 is not a new invention. We tested GOG Galaxy 2.0 in 2019, when the GOG online store was just taking shape. But after many years of optimization and refinement, it has become our favorite app for organizing all of our PC games.

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You could put app shortcuts for all these apps on your Start menu, but that would quickly get cluttered. (Also, there’s no solid support for folders in the Start menu in Windows 11.) Storing all these apps in one app like GOG Galaxy 2.0 works fine.

All your games in one place

The magic of GOG Galaxy 2.0 is that it integrates the different stores into its own unified interface. Officially, GOG Galaxy 2.0 only supports three online stores: its own GOG.com store, the Epic Games Store, as well as Xbox Live and the Game Pass Ultimate subscription. If you click the “Settings” cogwheel in the upper right corner and then navigate to “Add games and friends” > “Connect game accounts”, you can “connect” to any other game store. This store will show you its login interface and authentication method. After confirmation, GOG Galaxy 2.0 connects to the store and starts “importing” games that fill the main page of the application.

But that is not all. Community members have adapted the GOG SDK to also support other stores, some of which are included by default in the main GOG Galaxy 2.0 client: Amazon Games, Bethesda, Steam, Ubisoft, Origin and more . If you click the Settings cogwheel in the top right corner, then navigate to Add games and friends > Connect game accounts, you can add even more through an automatic GitHub search that runs in the background. For example, adding games purchased from the Humble Store is as easy as typing “Humble” into the search box under Community Integrations.

At this point, GOG Galaxy 2.0 achieves its fundamental goal of providing a single, unified interface for all of its games. You can quickly click through and filter through all the games you currently own, have installed, or are available to you through a subscription. Hovering over an icon will display the name of the game and the store it’s in. GOG also assigns separate icons for different versions of the game, such as the Game of the Year edition, in addition to the base game. You can also scan your PC for games not found in a store, or just manually add an executable. (This is usually only done with very old games that haven’t been re-released, like Looking Glass games like Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.)

In certain cases, you may have two copies of the same game in different stores: Europa Universalis IV may be available through both the Epic Games Store and through Xbox Game Pass membership. Here you can choose which of the two stores you want to download the game from.

GOG’s Galaxy app does a good job here, too. Clicking on a game icon in the main library will open a separate page with a summary and ratings for the game. Since integration with each game store varies (and some game stores offer features that others don’t), the richest pages are those associated with “official” GOG stores, such as B. Microsoft’s Xbox game store. Here you will find a detailed list of achievements and your rank among your friends who also play.

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Individual game pages (for some store games) display achievements, play time, and more.

GOG Galaxy 2.0 still has some catching up to do. It is not always clear which friends are online. As shown in the screenshot, four friends are online playing Microsoft PC games. But the left navigation bar shows that there are no friends online. However, the biggest flaw is that GOG Galaxy 2.0 does not display the size of a game before downloading it.

Of course, GOG Galaxy also advertise their own sales or deals on GOG. So you should periodically check with providers like Epic and Steam for current deals. If these disadvantages bother you, or the fact that GOG Galaxy sells its own games, you can

PlayNite
give it a try, this would be an open source alternative that offers many of the same features.

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Of course, the GOG app links to its own store.

There are also some things that GOG has no control over at the moment. You still need to download and run the various authentication/storefront apps like Steam or the Epic Games Store if you want to play a game from that store. Certain stores do not allow achievement tracking. GOG Galaxy 2.0 can’t update your games automatically either, but the other apps in the store can. Additionally, GOG Galaxy does not yet connect to community-developed mods or DLC, such as: For example, Steam Workshop: If you play games like Planet Coaster, you’ll need to download community-designed rides and accessories to Steam.

For us, these functional deficiencies are always worth it. The simple fact that you can see your games in one place and remember the games that can be easily forgotten is an additional relief for us.