Some people really don't like being asked to install "another" launcher.
It recently became known that Owlcat Games intends to add to the list of companies that have launched their own launcher.
In the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy community, the developers explained their motivation. They noticed that their games are sometimes not even noticed by people who have previously played one of the studio's projects:
[...] according to surveys, a surprisingly large part of the Pathfinder 2 audience, who expressed a desire to play "similar CRPGs", had never heard of Rogue Trader. This is not exactly unexpected — we live in an age of information overload, and it is easy to miss news even in the area of your interests. But with this in mind, the need for a tool for cross-promotion of our games has been growing.
As a result, the studio came up with the idea of creating a launcher where information about games and news would be published. Its testing is scheduled to launch at the end of January 2026.
Some PC gamers are not very happy about the prospect of getting another launcher on their PC. One of the community members threatened to seek a refund for the game if he "encounters this damned piece of junk."
Owlcat Games clarified that the launcher will be optional:
If you do not want to use any launcher services and see our news, just launch the game directly through the executable file, or select the appropriate option in Steam — the game will continue to work perfectly without the launcher.
