
Playnite looks good...as I've finally started moving beyond Steam for my PC games, I've been wanting something exactly like this. I'll give that a go.
Would love to hear how you find it. Are you doing Game Pass PC?
I've loaded up everything (that's current) on there. Steam, Xbox Game Pass on PC, Origin, Epic, Twitch, Uplay, Battle.net, and even GOG. The bad parts are mostly small issues, such as sometime it doesn't load some graphics for games, and it wants to keep track of time in seconds in the behind the scenes input box so if you want to update gameplay time from some other source, it can take a lot of guess work. I also do not see an option to import time from other sources like my old xfire stats. But aside from that, I can launch things from any source and with those 8 sources, I feel like it has become a necessity.
Steam as my go-to single launcher was great when my non-Steam games were very limited, but thanks to all the freebies and XBGP PC not working with Steam, that's no longer the case. In fact, I've spent very little time with Steam since June.
At least EA is coming back to Steam, which makes me happy and more likely to pick up the new Star Wars game earlier since I love games developed by Respawn.
I use Playnite as a "finder" more than a launcher, to remind myself which service I own a given game on.
My biggest problem is that it feels like every time I open it, I have to re-authenticate to all the services.
2nd biggest problem is that it doesn't hook into the Xbox Beta app which is my launcher for PC Games Pass. If I have to manually add things to Playnite, that defeats the object of it.
I use Playnite as a "finder" more than a launcher, to remind myself which service I own a given game on.
My biggest problem is that it feels like every time I open it, I have to re-authenticate to all the services.
2nd biggest problem is that it doesn't hook into the Xbox Beta app which is my launcher for PC Games Pass. If I have to manually add things to Playnite, that defeats the object of it.
Well, to be fair, nothing hooks into XBGP PC right now, and the fact that they added a specific menu item for the service makes me think they are working on it.
As for re-authenticating, I've had that issue with a 3 of the services, 2 of which I use so infrequently it doesn't matter - Battle.net and GOG. I hadn't really even noticed until recently, actually.
Also, in day to day practice, I've taken to mostly finding the game in PLaynite, launching the first time and as I continue to play it across sessions, using the recently launched list that pops up from left clicking the system tray icon.
EDIT: Re-authenticated all the services having issues, and restated my computer and re-ran the check and found everything worked fine. Then I thought about it and yeah, shouldn't have to worry about re-authenticating services often (ever, really) so that is something they need to address. Guess I got into a sub-conscious defense mode since I've been enjoying using it.
Having so many instances of Steam "not responding" whenever I try to open it up from the toolbar, the startup menu, running as administrator, or whatever since the update. Kind of annoying.
Having so many instances of Steam "not responding" whenever I try to open it up from the toolbar, the startup menu, running as administrator, or whatever since the update. Kind of annoying.
I've been having to restated Steam a lot too lately.
[quote="mrtomaytohead"]Would love to hear how you find it. Are you doing Game Pass PC?[\quote]
Early days, but I'm set up now and I like it a lot. I am on Game Pass PC, which is part of the impetuous for using it. (I spent a decent bit of time trying to hack into the locked up way Game Pass games are installed, and it just wasn't worth it.)
So far Playnite works seamlessly with Game Pass games for me, as long as they are installed. Can't use it to browse uninstalled games available, but that's ok. I also have authentication issues with Battle.net, but I don't actually own any of those games, and I don't much play them, so that's ok.
It's great to see everything I own across all services. And being a total nerd, I was able to pull out an export of every PC game I own across all platforms so I could potentially do a "pick a random game" type thing. Maybe that way I'll someday play one of the gems buried in my backlog.
I'm not ecstatic about the new Library interface, but it's okay. My first reaction was annoyance at all the visual clutter. My thought was, roughly, "oh, great, now they're advertising at me in my Library, what a bunch of jerks."
But then I realized that the 'ads' are all about content I already own, and the default right pane on Library was pretty much dead space. I don't really even look at it, I immediately click over on the games on the left side, so I end up almost entirely missing the new page anyway.
I'm not over-fond of their font choice, I think it's kinda ugly, but I've seen worse updates in programs. And I think the new categorization features may end up being pretty handy.
My overall impression isn't especially favorable, but it's not unfavorable, either. Even if it's still a bit inept in its execution, it feels like they're genuinely trying to make it better for me, not better for them. I can cheerfully excuse them fumbling around and experimenting if I feel the motivation is good.
My actual flow is almost entirely unchanged; launch Steam, seek game on left, click it, click Play. The core functionality is preserved, so I'm good.
Roke wrote:Having so many instances of Steam "not responding" whenever I try to open it up from the toolbar, the startup menu, running as administrator, or whatever since the update. Kind of annoying.
I've been having to restated Steam a lot too lately.
Thankfully the most recent update seems to have fixed things for me.
Crossposting from the Steam Community thread:
4dSwissCheese wrote:Grenn wrote:They changed steam again.
They sure did. I will note, because it's the first thing I wanted back and searched the steam forums for, if you put
steam://open/minigameslist
into a browser it'll open the little games list like before, and if you append-no-browser +open steam://open/minigameslist
to the Target line (outside of the quotation marks) in the properties of the Steam shortcut on PC it'll open just this little games menu and not the full new thing.Hey, that's clever.
Realizing variations of this question have been answered both here and on the Steam forums, I was still going to try asking it here because there's some odd specifics to it.
Last weekend I re-installed Windows 10. I didn't bother backing up Steam games because they were on internal HDD E, so unaffected by formatting C and doing a clean Windows 10 install. That went fine, much faster than I would have guessed. System works so much better than the 8.1 upgraded to 10 version.
Somewhere along the way E was either formatted or had a major glitch, because the new Windows saw E as blank. The only thing of real value on the drive were Steam savegames, and of those, only about a dozen whose progress I cared about. Most of which don't save to the cloud.
So I used Recuva to find the Steamapps data on the E drive, and recovered it to my NAS. As I was going to import it to the newly formatted E drive, I noted that Windows File Explorer was still counting at 3.02 TB of data to be moved.
The E drive is a 3 TB drive. It couldn't possibly have previously held a 3.1TB Steamapps folder AND all the other aspects of Steam, plus Blizzard games, etc.
So I've tried moving individual steamapps/common/"game" files over to the new steamapps/common/"game" folder, but steam is still asking me to install the game.
So (finally) the question: is there a way to salvage these save game files?
I don't mind having to re-install the games, I just would like the 118 hours I put into Subnautica to still be useful. By the way, Steam knows the hours I put in, and can see the screenshots. But no game. I will probably go ahead to reinstall the games and see if the save games are salvaged, since in theory they're backed up on the NAS, but if anyone knows of a more direct method, I'm all ears.
[hack to show Steam mini games list]
This is (thankfully) no longer necessary; the Steam games mini-list is called "Small Mode" and is now back in the regular Steam client. It's in the View Menu, next to Big Picture Mode.
Is there a way to filter out VR only games in the store? I don't want to just filter out VR games, because then I would lose ones that have a VR and a normal mode.
Is there a way to filter out VR only games in the store? I don't want to just filter out VR games, because then I would lose ones that have a VR and a normal mode.
Yup, in the Steam client, click the drop down by your name in the top right, then select Store Preferences - there's a "Show Virtual Reality content" checkbox for you to uncheck.
You can also put tags in to exclude too, which is great - for some reason Steam used to show me a bunch of anime visual novels, which are decidedly not my preferred genre.
I had a look and I already have that one unticked, I guess they still come up if you hit the "recent releases" list, no option to filter them out there.
Also, I don't actually want to filter out anime visual novels, or adult content, but I do want to write off "anything with hentai in the title". Maybe the ignore button and the magic of machine learning will do it.
Edit: also, "Based on products you marked as 'ignore', you may want to consider excluding some of these tags: Simulation, Action, FPS, Multiplayer, Open World." Lol. That's half my games list.
My excluded tags are MMORPG, RTS, Visual Novel, Anime and Hidden Object, which are in line with my tastes, and then Memes and RPGMaker, which are amazing at filtering out a whole lot of utter junk.
Wow guys, you buy one thing involving a naughty anime maid, and suddenly the recommendations section in Steam looks like the for-sale list in a Las Vegas back alley basement store.
Wow guys, you buy one thing involving a naughty anime maid, and suddenly the recommendations section in Steam looks like the for-sale list in a Las Vegas back alley basement store.
That isn’t normal for Steam now-and-days?
“We are not interested in distributing any of your games on Steam in the future.”
Dayum.
Something I just noticed, the Ignore list on Steam now has two categories. The 2nd is "played on another platform". I saw it for Moonlighter advertised on the main page but that I got for free on Epic. So I went through my ignore list and found about 7 other games I had marked ignore the last few years because I had them somewhere else.
Glad they finally added this, don't know when they did, but I appreciate it. I don't want to ignore games i like but I had to to something to keep myself from accidentally buying something on Steam that I got already on Epic or PS4 or Switch.
Wow, I've been wanting that for a while, but figured they had no incentive to do such a thing. Glad to see that.
Is there a way to just turn off or silence trading cards as like a whole feature? I super dont care about the trickle of cards I get from games and its making the comments on my mods harder to see :/
I mostly just dont want to see them showing up in my 'new notifications' thing
I don't think there is.
Steam's Proton stuff is seriously impressive. In testing out some motherboard issues, I put Fedora on an old, tiny SSD that I had laying around because I don't want my Windows install crashing constantly. And since I was playing around in there already, I decided to install Steam and see how their WINE implementation/fork/whatever performed and wow it's good. I installed XCOM: Chimera Squad, which isn't currently listed as a supported game, and it installed, launched, and runs without issue, holding a constant 100FPS on max settings.
Granted, this isn't the most impressive looking game out there, but it is a new game and my previous experience was that games were playable via WINE -- if you were willing to fiddle with them until you got the settings just right and you weren't concerned about massive performance loss. Honestly, this was good enough that if I could get Epic, Ubisoft, and Origin games running with it I could drop Windows completely.
A bunch of EA games showed up on Steam today. Notable mentions include Dragon Age Inquisition, Burnout Paradise Remastered, and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Notable omissions include The Sims 4 and Mass Effect 3.
That's interesting.
Since Origin stopped giving away free games every month or so I go ages without even opening it.
I legit forgot about origin.
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