Galaxy 2.0 and Steam Beta

On June 24th GoG, which is owned by CD Projeckt, released the first closed beta version of their Galaxy 2.0 client. Top on the list of features announced was the promise of a single unified library. A client that would allow you to launch any game you owned, from any number of proprietary clients including from a Steam library.

It turns out that some of the library filter features that were just included as quality of life options ended up being something that was so popular that eventually even Valve had to take note. They opened up a beta for their Steam client featuring the most significant changes in what feels like a decade on September 17th.

While Steam has the benefit of ecosystem, they by far have the largest share of the digital games marketplace, GoG would seem to have the more interesting offering. Their new platform allows you to integrate and launch games from any other platform. It does this by actually starting the services, so you will still see Steam load in the background. You can also manage installations of these games, customize box art, and of course filter your games based on criteria and save those results as "bookmarks."

The other factor playing in here is how willing companies will be to either reign in games to their own platforms, or utilize Epic's fledgling platform to pull people away from steam. This has worked wonders (or horrors depending on your perspective) in the digital media space with every single company starting up their own proprietary streaming platform. The question is, will gamers be as will to adopt that many platforms, or is GoG ahead of the game in recognizing their desire to have one platform to rule them all?