News GOG Galaxy 2.0 beta signups open

This is good news. There are a couple good launchers right now with Playnite and Launchbox, but neither has proper Steam grid 460x215 icon support. That's bad because Steam looks like they're moving to that stupid movie poster/box art format, and frankly, box art is horrific and makes your library look like Gamestop.

Ok so this has little to do with GOG 2.0, but with Steam lumbering toward some kind of possible ugly grid re-do and Playnite and Launchbox both completely obsessed with horrible box art, I might get another alternative here.

Edit: Oh damn nevermind. GOG looks to be going with bad box art too. I'm screwed.
 
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Import all your games from PC and consoles, build and organize them into one master collection.
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Yo what? I can import my console stuff? That's huge.

EDIT: Wait, can it actually track my playtime on other platforms? Consoles too? Because if it can, again that's huge,
 
It's a good idea.

Personally, I don't care too much about having my library consolidated. I'm more interested in what features and long-term support a platform provides. I'm curious about the mention of importing your console library though.

Aside from their stance on curation, I like GOG quite a bit. I hope they continue to improve.
 
Sounds like it tries to go beyond the usual launcher aggregators with the upcoming discovery feature. What remains to be seen is how neutral it attempts to be between storefronts, or if GoG is going to be at the top of each search result.

That being said, good on them and I look forward to it.
 
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That's interesting but this will just confuse me I think. I like to "seperate" my launchers and know what's where.
 
I fully expect them to have no "neutrality" in the storefront whatsoever, but a launcher that launches all the games AND tracks playtime and achievements on everything (even consoles??) is a great selling point IMO.

You can already setup Steam to launch everything if you want, but "non-Steam" games get really shitty tracking and whatnot. So if this will roll up all my games into one place with consistent Achievements/Playtime and eventually friends (on the "soon" timeframe) that would really be a big plus.

I'll checkout the beta, but cautiously optomistic here.
 
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All in one launcher with achievements and play time! Love this concept and it's GOG who is making it. I signed up for a beta. Hoping to get in the first wave :)

Wildebeet said:
This is good news. There are a couple good launchers right now with Playnite and Launchbox, but neither has proper Steam grid 460x215 icon support. That's bad because Steam looks like they're moving to that stupid movie poster/box art format, and frankly, box art is horrific and makes your library look like Gamestop.

Ok so this has little to do with GOG 2.0, but with Steam lumbering toward some kind of possible ugly grid re-do and Playnite and Launchbox both completely obsessed with horrible box art, I might get another alternative here.

Edit: Oh damn nevermind. GOG looks to be going with bad box art too. I'm screwed.
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What's wrong with nice looking box arts? There is a button for customizing, maybe you can change how to view the games there

I love their cookie message :D
RNyt0yf.png
 
I wonder how they accumulate playtime? Only when launched through Galaxy or do they grab statistics from other storefronts?
 
Thinking about it, this can be quite huge for me, if it is done well then I can see it being the main place where I care about achievements and such, since it takes in all my gaming into it, so it will be the one that matters.

You know what, THIS is actual competition to Steam.
 
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It looks much nicer to me than the other catch-all launchers I've seen and promises a lot of functions I'm interested in.

Odd how GOG and not a behemoth engine maker with the biggest game in the world are trying to make a client worth a damn. Then again, maybe it's not that odd at all.
 
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daxy said:
It looks much nicer to me than the other catch-all launchers I've seen and promises a lot of functions I'm interested in.

Odd how GOG and not a behemoth engine maker with the biggest game in the world are trying to make a client worth a damn. Then again, maybe it's not that odd at all.
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that's because epic don't care ... they don't give a crap about making a good client, store or platform ... they just want to gain a huge market share ... and FAST
 
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Looks nice, editing metadata locally is probably my most wanted feature (which steam UI update will also offer to an extend iirc).
 
This can track hours from games played on consoles?
 
Its so weird how on various forums people who knee-jerk hate steam are falling over themselves to declare how wonderful this is going to be, when Steams had a similar - albeit entirely manual rather than automated scraping of your hard drive - for basically forever.
 
Nyarlathotep said:
Its so weird how on various forums people who knee-jerk hate steam are falling over themselves to declare how wonderful this is going to be, when Steams had a similar - albeit entirely manual rather than automated scraping of your hard drive - for basically forever.
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because it's Not Steam™ so it automatically makes it awesomely amazing (regardless of the actual quality) ;)

in all seriousness, though - seems like they (gog) are willing to put actual work into that thing ... including making deals with all those publishers to make those games installable/compatible with galaxy, instead of just relying on their good will

or at least that's how i understood their announcement
 
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I'm not really excited about a launcher to launch my steam games, or other games, more about have one account that tracks all my gaming across different accounts. Sure there are services like that already but none of them are backed by someone big like gog. So this has the chance to be something worthwhile.
 
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This looks exciting! I hope a big picture mode is on the cards further down the line.
 
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Nothing yet. Haven't yet checked my spam folder, though, so it could be in there.

checks

Nope, nada.
 
Deques said:
Anyone besides fantomena received an invite?
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It's weird, I have yet to receive an invite for the closed beta, but I did receive one for the technical alpha and today when I opened up the client that I downloaded for the alpha technical, the client updated to the beta client (as in, the update info stated I have the beta client now).

So I assume anyone who was invited to the tech alpha is automatically granted access to the open beta.
 
I got an invite for the alpha last week and like fantomena said, it updated to the beta today. I also signed up minutes after the announcement of the 2.0 client, so that might've been a factor. Though Yas, I believe, also signed up super early but had not gotten an alpha invite. Luck of the draw. Usually I don't get access to these things.

Is there an NDA on the closed beta? IIRC they didn't want you to share screenshots of the alpha, but I didn't receive any information about the beta.
 
One of my big takeaways after using this for a while as an alternative to Steam is that I really miss the community features. Galaxy 2 does a decent job of trying to integrate all your accounts as well as setting up its own community hub, but it's not quite the same as jumping into a Steam forum, checking out your friends' screenshots, reading user reviews, and going through curator recommendations. I think it could help a lot if they allow you to at least import friends from your other gaming accounts. Right now, all you can do is pull from Facebook for some reason or another. Hopefully they'll do something about that soon.

I also think that the library is basically a web page or at least it feels like one. It's not quite as snappy as Steam. It's just a little sluggish, kind of like Origin. Some of the great features Galaxy 1.2 had are gone in this version, too. I've got a long notepad file for the feedback form that I'll be filling out later. There's still a lot that could use improving before I'd start using this on a regular basis.

It's a very solid foundation though. I think that if they really nail this, it could be a great spoke off of which you can access your library in other places. And it already did what they were hoping it would; I started looking at and using GOG more often, even for new games.
 
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FInally i was able to import ALL my Steam games. I do not like that the genres are fixed and i can only use tags to order my games a bit more.
 
I'll probably still keep all my libraries separate when they inflict this on the rest of us. I might add my Ubi and Origin games as i only have about 5 in each but i'll keep Steam and GOG apart most likely.
 
Finally got my invite 🙌 I signed up june 26.

Edit: Have I really played The Sims 4 for 226 hours? 😐

And I'm a bit disappointed there's no integration for Battle.net, Itch, Twitch or Discord. Hope it's in the works.
 
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Had to reinstall some apps cos for some reason even though they were still on my pc, folders, files, etc the system forgot it had them installed so no registry entries, no start menu entries, pinned shortcuts, etc., it was all gone, and I accidentally got the old version and I have to say I prefer it for having the community tab accessible from within the app. They really need to add it back to the new one, I hadn't visited the forums since getting the new beta (ok I did deliberately google search the specific Thief series forum I wanted a couple times to see if new fan patch versions were out) and they can be useful.
 
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Got my invite as well, I will definitely check it out, but as far as I know this has no TV/BPM-like interface, right?
 
I have gotten my invite for the past few months, However I am thinking of moving ontoa Linux distribution as being my OS. Any words on whether they would be working on a Linux compatible client.
 
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