GOG Galaxy 2.0 - All your games and friends in one place - and they do mean ALL

I finally got access this week - haven’t had a chance to give it a try but the rollout timing could have been better. Beta announced right before the summer sale with the promise of adding people quickly on a first come, first serve basis. I signed up on day 1 and it took about 2 months to get access. My enthusiasm has waned, and if it worked well I probably would have spent more in their sale.

The problem they have is that Playnite is better and has more features. Currently they’re lagging behind on multiple fronts.

Nice review. I’m looking forward to that. I wish I could try it now. I’m especially looking forward to seeing a unified library that includes Playstation and Xbox platforms too.

I got an invite earlier this week. Just set it up. Was easy to connect to the other platforms. So far it’s a positive experience. It’s nice to almost see all the games I have on the various platforms. Right now I think all I’m missing are games from twitch.

I finally got my invite and I’m liking it so far. In the future I’d like to see a Big Screen mode akin to Steam’s (controllable with a game pad), and it would be nice if you could connect your Humble account as well. It doesn’t look like I can add my physical games through here either which is a real bummer. I have a ton of them and I play them pretty often. Steam does allow that, so hopefully GOG will implement it soon.

I do look forward to utilizing the rating and tag system to organize this mess a bit better.

There’s no centralized at-a-glance downloads status button/screen either. It’s annoying having to drill down into each game to see the download status of each one individually.

The best part of the garbage GOG Galaxy client is that on a Mac, it will not work if multiple people are logged in to the machine.

Note: I didn’t say “logged in to GOG.” You can be the only person running GOG Galaxy, but if other people are logged in in any way on your machine, the app won’t launch.

Yeah, I noticed that today too.
The whole client feels a little lightweight. The space that’s taken up by news sources and various links to groups, guides, support, manuals on Steam is given up to an “activity feed” that’s empty for 90% of games and a scraped trailer and store description. The “recently played” screen wastes a ton of space too, so you can permanently be reminded that other people are playing Fotrnite. Luckily, having all your games in one launcher works so well and is so useful that I’ve been using it anyway.

According to leaks, something similar to this should be coming to Steam with the upcoming redesign.

The new version of Playnite is awesome btw. Full screen mode has been redesigned, and the filtering/sorting options are incredible.

Have you tried the latest version? I haven’t had any lag issues.

Galaxy 2.0 uses electron as its backend, so it has smoother scrolling built-in. This comes at a performance and memory cost. Playnite uses C#, which is generally much less resource-heavy. Smooth scrolling can be added, but it hasn’t been a priority yet.

Just got in. Nice. If only adding non-steam games wasn’t such a hassle. And the maximum character length of tags is a bit short. I wanted to duplicate my system from steam (items of +1 leveliness, space the final frontier, massive organised violence, etc) but had to abbreviate them to far less interesting ones.

Was there a way to ask for an invite from GoG?

You should still be able to sign up here:

Thanks Ark! Signed up. I had the original GoG Galaxy and had opted to test beta releases within that, but apparently that’s not enough to be allowed access to 2.0.

Yeah I meant games that are sorta standalone like Elite Dangerous and DCS.

Just a heads up. I bought Elite Dangerous stand-alone as well, but eventually they gave me a steam key too, so I have it in my steam library as well. You probably knew that already, but just in case. For the record, I still have my original installed, and didn’t bother installing it through steam either.

Yeah steam installations for VR games don’t play well with oculus for some bizarre reason. Fuck oculus tbh.

I don’t exactly understand what you say here. Fullscreen mode is mainly built for gamepad usage, or keyboard, where one push = one transition to another title. Desktop mode is where I have some trouble on my laptop, specifically. A touchpad is really built for smooth scrolling, and so scrolling in desktop mode on a touchpad feels imprecise because it’s too jumpy. With a scroll wheel, it’s also a little too jumpy, but it’s not nearly as bad. I’m not sure, however, how these things would affect fullscreen mode, of all things.

Funny, I just last week installed Playnite and then I get an invite to the GOG Galaxy 2.0 beta today. I like Playnite but it took quite a bit of effort to make it look tidy and I had to login to a few platforms a couple of times before they stuck.

Looks like I chose the right time to use BitWarden! This was a breeze, aside from Steam which required Steam Guard and my phone was on charge in another room. I like that GOG Galaxy has PSN and Xbox.

It’s exciting to have two portals for all (or most of) my games!

It can’t seem to find you by username alone but will helpfully suggest @BrianRubin