2K removes its pointless launcher from Civilization 6, while also announcing that Civilization 7 players will never have to suffer launching the game twice for no reason

(Image credit: Firaxis Games)

PC Gaming is beset by terrible supplementary launchers, from the rubbish EA app to the pointless Ubisoft Connect, all the way down to the digital wasteland that is the Microsoft Store. One of the most baffling examples of the form, however, is the 2K launcher. Rarely glimpsed (because it's only mandated for about seven games) the 2K launcher does basically nothing apart from force you to click a second button when you launch some (not all) 2K published games on Steam. It also occasionally causes performance problems for those games, such as slowing down superhero shenanigans in Marvel's Midnight Suns.

Anyway, it seems someone at 2K finally woke up and smelled the futility. In a "quick update" regarding Civ 6 posted on Reddit, 2K community manager sar_firaxis revealed that "Earlier today, the 2K launcher has been removed from Steam, with plans to also remove it on Epic in the near future." In the same post, sar_firaxis also confirmed that "Civ 7 will NOT utilize the 2K launcher."

No reason was given for the change, but the general response to the decision was one of relief. "Thank goodness. I am very tired of having half a dozen launchers on my computer in addition to Steam," wrote user Graymaven," while user Snownova said "Hallalujah! Praise be to Sid!"

It is worth noting, however, that many Civ 6 players seem to have been working around the launcher anyway, which could be partly behind the decision to ditch it entirely. "To be fair, a lot of us circumvented the launcher altogether," user darthreuental pointed out, while GardenSquid1 said "I have been circumventing the launcher so long I forgot it existed."

The thread does confirm one important point about the launcher change, prompted by Human-Law1085 asking "What happens with the DirectX 11/DirectX 12 choice?" This is one of the few user options the 2K launcher facilitated. In response, Modo44 points out that you can now make this decision via Steam itself. "Hit Play in the Steam client, and you get a pop-up asking for your choice."

It's nice to see some sensible thinking from 2K. While it's understandable that publishers would prefer players to launch their games from their own platforms, and it's probably a good thing for Steam to have some competition, many of these launchers smack of pride rather than anything actually useful to players, and the 2K launcher is arguably the most arbitrary of the lot. So it's comforting to know players' enjoyment of Civ 7 won't be mildly inconvenienced by a broadly useless secondary launcher. Let's hope 2K does the same thing with its other games, and that some other publishers (*cough* EA *splutter* Ubisoft) follow suit.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.