Owlcat Games Announces "Optional" Launcher
It's YAGL (Yet Another Game Launcher) as Owlcat announce they will be rolling out a new launcher across their products, with testing to commence in parallel with the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy alpha testing.
Owlcat Games, developer of acclaimed cRPGs Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous have announced they are hard at work on a game launcher which will be deployed across all of their products.
The move, which was announced on the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy playtest news hub, features somewhat muddled messaging in terms of the company's reasoning for such a move. The stated justification varies between making the launcher a one-stop shop for information relating to all Owlcat's titles, to an unashamed cross-promotional tool.
a surprisingly large portion of the PF2 audience who express a clear desire to play a ‘similar CRPG’ have never even heard of Rogue Trader
The company has at least shown some self-awareness of the general unpopularity of games launchers, stating that they "want to be really careful about it, testing its core features and hearing what [players] think before moving further with it".
Owlcat continue on to state that the launcher will not require registration, gather any information from players and will not install any other software.
They've also stated that players can fairly easily disable the launcher in Steam with a simple radio button to launch the game's executable rather than the launcher - and hopefully this will remain in place once the launcher rolls out across the full library of Owlcat titles.
The launcher is set to begin testing via the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy alpha test from 27 January 2026.
What's your opinion on (seemingly) every company having their own proprietary launcher on top of the storefront their games are purchased from? Is it overkill?
Join the conversation over on Mastodon and let us know what you think!