Stop it. Stop it! Stop it! I live in launcher Hell. In my taskbar, unfamiliar and unwelcome guests jostle each other in an endless horrible party: the Epic Game Store, Ubisoft Connect (which we all still call Uplay), Battle.net, the hated EA App, the Rockstar Social Club, the Paradox Launcher. I did not invite them and I do not want them here.
This week: Detonated on the launchpad. Don't worry, it's fine.
And yet they will pop up and loudly announce themselves whenever I launch a solid portion of games in my library. Sometimes, as a treat, they will just hang for a bit and forget what they were doing, leaving me to go back and re-launch whichever game I was trying to get to in an attempt to prod their addled machine-minds into remembering what I asked of them. Sometimes they'll just crash and require euthanising via the Task Manager. As shall we all, some day.
As with so many aspects of using a personal computer in 2025, they are an invasion: an unwelcome intrusion into what used to be a relatively simple and controllable part of our hobby.
Like the spyware and AI gunk that builds in Windows 11's crevices with every new update, the launchers in my taskbar and start menu proliferate parthenogenetically. Look away for half a second and when your head turns back, more have appeared. Unlike with Windows, I can't solve the problem by switching to Bazzite. The launchers follow me wherever I go.
I don't ask for much. Sure, in an ideal world, I'd only have software on my PC that I have actively, consciously chosen to install, but I'm not so naive as to think the world as we've currently structured it would ever allow that.
I know the boys down in the lab have gotta get all their juicy telemetry—the hows, whys and whens of me playing their game. What do I look at? What do I click on? What niche erotica am I consuming (it's the wall art of the Quseir Amra)? By all means, lads, take it, but don't force me to interact with you while you hoover it up. You don't need to add insult to injury, here.
All I ask is that you either run your Stasi processes invisibly, off in the background, whenever I launch your game, or else only make me look at the launcher once
All I ask is that you either run your Stasi processes invisibly, off in the background, whenever I launch your game, or else only make me look at the launcher once before I click a clearly marked 'Skip Launcher' checkbox. I will also accept being able to stick '--skip-launcher' in the Steam launch options, but you only get half points for that.
Because here's the thing: these launchers would be intrinsically irritating even if they worked flawlessly. There's the data-harvesting, sure, but more to the point is they're so fundamentally unnecessary.
It is a rank absurdity that my main launcher, Steam, has to launch another launcher before it can launch the game I actually want to launch*. To a certain kind of mind—mine—there is something inherently annoying about how redundant the whole thing is. It feels messy.
And they don't work perfectly. Far from it. Nine times out of ten, any launcher on my PC that isn't Steam will decide that I haven't suffered enough and force me to log in again. So I have to launch another program—my password manager—to get at those details. Once I've got my details inputted and my 2FA code happily nestled in its box, the EA App (or whatever it is I'm wrestling with) will proceed to stunlock my computer while it processes the gargantuan task of launching a videogame, literally the one thing it is ostensibly designed to do.
It's ridiculous, and it's perhaps the only thing I envy about the iron-handed dictatorship our console brethren live under: they press a button and the game goes. Is that too much to ask? That I just press a button and the game goes? It is? Okay. I'll go find my Uplay password again.
*Launch.
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