GOG announces Galaxy 2.0

Been a lot of rumors that GOG or Galaxy might be headed for the dustbin of history; it's never been the most popular launcher out there unless you were looking for older games (which it's good for), and I know they had some layoffs recently. But it looks like they're still swinging. It sounds like the next release is going to be pulling in data from every other launcher out there:

“As gamers, we need to juggle between multiple clients to access our games and see what our friends are playing,” says Piotr Karwowski, Managing Director at GOG. “We believe gamers deserve a better experience, and this became the driving force to redefine GOG GALAXY client,” Karwowski adds. “GOG GALAXY 2.0 is designed for all gamers and extends well beyond existing GOG.COM users, into both PC and console platforms.”

Once you connect GOG GALAXY 2.0 with other platforms, it will import all your games into one library. You will see your friends activities and online status across connected platforms. All new library and friends features apply to your GOG.COM games and enhance your experience. And it’s designed to protect your privacy – your data belongs to you and will never be shared with third parties. We see it as an all-in-one solution for the present-day gamer.

Your Games.

• Import all your games from PC and consoles, build and organize them into one master collection. Install and launch any PC game you own, no matter the platform.
• Keep track of all your achievements, hours played and games owned.
• Customize your library by filtering, sorting, tagging, and adding your own visuals like game backgrounds or covers.
• Follow upcoming releases and discover games popular among your friends and the gaming community.
  • Your Friends.
    • Bring together your friends from all platforms and see their online status.
    • No matter on which platform your friends are, you can chat with them.
    • See your friends’ cross-platform achievements, game time milestones and recently played games.
    • See who’s the master collector, completionist or spends the most time playing.

This all sounds pretty bold; I'll be curious to see how they pull it off. This is still in beta; maybe I'll try to opt in. I don't use GOG all that much these days because most of my games are in Uplay at the moment, but if it can be a seamless all-in-one launcher, might be nice?

WHAT?!?

That sounds like a hell of a lot of programing. I'm pretty curious to see what it will all look like. Also why consoles? Not like you can play console games on PC.

Those privacy options sound appealing. Does steam offer the same level of protection?

Although most of my online friends are on steam anyway.

Sounds good, my Galaxy is always sitting there next to Steam and Origin but I never have much use for it. I signed up to get into the Beta when they start it.

Also:

Seriously WHAT?!

Most of what I've been playing lately has been Odyssey and its DLC and Division 2, except for MTGA!

@casepb: Seen people saying it's more for tracking achievements/playtime. Also kinda nice to have your ENTIRE library visible in one place, especially in my case because I can't easily recall what I own digitally on PSN anymore.

If this is able to look at, say, my Steam library and let me download a game from Steam, wouldn't it still need to launch Steam in order to do this? Games that run on Steam, Origin, Uplay, and the like use those distribution/store clients as DRM. This seems weird and probably won't make those other companies happy.

Also it's amusing that the PC store known for no DRM is now going to be home to ALL THE DRM! ?

I’m down for GOG to finally have a reason for me to use it. I think it’s an ok launcher, but I never use it. It’ll replace Steam if it can work with SteamVR, if not, then it’ll just sit with Epic, Origin and Battlenet

I'd be really interested to see this in action; I use the current version of Galaxy on a pretty regular basis.

Wait....

"Consoles"

???

No, but with a big digital collection you might end up forgetting what you own and accidentally buy two copies of a game. I often have to crosscheck each storefront to make sure i don't own it on some platform already. If Galaxy will pull in all that information into one place they will at the very least get me on there platform to see what i own, and maybe consider buying it from them rather then the other storefront (maybe). And hell if they can show me a list of what i own on PlayStation better then Sony can im all for it, because i have to use PSDLE right now to get a good list of what i own on there sadly.

GoG Galaxy is alright. It's the one I've had the least technical issues with, but I also only really use it for Gwent. Will be keeping an eye on it for now.

Install and launch any PC game you own, no matter the platform.

Does this mean I can launch my pc games on my console? It sounds that way but it's so huge that I can't believe until I see it.

No. Galaxy is a PC app.

This means you can install and launch any PC game from any PC platform within Galaxy (Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, Windows Store, etc).

When you realize that gog has always had DRM of some form (it is basically the Stardock GOO model without the ability to buy a retail copy) and that gog themselves are the ones who led the charge to redefine "DRM" in a way that people claim Steam is not... it makes sense

Still, this could be interesting. I really want to see the implementation because for this to be meaningful, and not just xfire, it needs:

• Some way to know your actual store inventory: If this just tells me I have D:OS installed and doesn't realize I have Battle Brothers "in the cloud" then it is worthless as I still need to check each client
• While not as useful for me, cross network chat would be nice. And that I have no idea how it can even work as I don't think any of the major store fronts expose the APIs required to write your own client
• Cross-network matchmaking: I REALLY see no way this can work without a lot of help from the actual game devs as you need to translate a SteamID to a potentially non-existent UplayID

There are multiple other programs attempting to do the same thing, but there are always hurdles with regards to the information each "platform" is willing to share which makes non of them a seamless experience.
I like GOG, and i install Galaxy due to my positive experiences with them and how low impact it is, i don't need anything attempting to be more complex, i won't use any of its features.

There are several programs that are aiming to do what Galaxy is promising. Just for reference, I am using a program called Playnite after a Raycevick recommendation. Its cool and provides some of the functionalities GOG Galaxy is aiming for (it even detect my emulators libraries as if they were separate collections), but there are some convenience in having a high profile developer getting into it (at least they can have leverage for publishers to give them some support).

Some of the features like cross-platform chat and stats seem crazy.

I don't really know this could work in a way that's at all useful, but I appreciate the ambition I guess. I quit GOG before Galaxy came out (I got really irritated at a lot of the community and messaging of the service), so I can't speak to the client itself but I haven't heard people talk about it much, which itself says something.

GOG is great - the fact that you can play most (if not all) of the games in their catalogue independent of any third-party launcher or internet connection is good enough to be called "DRM-free" for me.

The fact that none of their games required their launcher put Galaxy in an odd predicament, however, as there was no real reason to use it.

I'm super interested to see what Galaxy 2.0 will bring.