I’m frankly amazed that companies still insist on creating their own launchers, despite every company getting well deserved flak whenever they do it.
Everyone of them has an asshole in marketing thinking like
It’s not spam! Our players will appreciate getting news about our new games.
Launchers are also trackers that monitor where users interact with the software. Owlcat wants the telemetry data to sell as a side hustle. It’s like they don’t make games to be fun anymore; games are marketing tools.
Even that dumb argument of theirs falls flat once you see that plenty of games use the main menu screen as a little ad space for their own store or similar games.
Thus, while the idea of an Owlcat Launcher sounds good on paper
No, it doesn’t even get that far.
Why did Owlcat make a launcher? Well, it’s a pretty logical step, if you think about it. The company’s research showed that a lot of players looking for similar games to its current successes in Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous didn’t know about the other title.
A default setting in Steam is that there’s a What’s New banner at the top of the library screen, where it will show you updates from games in your library. Frequently, they’ll use that to advertise the studio’s next game. If I have Borderlands 1, 2, 3, Pre-Sequel, and both Tales from the Borderlands games, each of them will have an ad letting me know about BL4, and they will display that same message multiple times, once per other game in my library. But apart from that, don’t make the thing you sold me worse so that you can advertise your next thing.
Launcher aka ad delivery platform.
