I finally got my chance to join the closed beta for the new GOG Galaxy client and my early impressions are that the GOG team are already delivering on that promise of creating the one gateway to all of your games libraries.

On installing the new client (which replaces the current version) you can jump into the settings menu and quickly add your other services. The Xbox Live integration is officially supported but there are already community created ones for Epic Games Store, PlayStation Network, Origin, Steam and UPlay. The process to add them is quite painless and after a short wait for Galaxy to pull in that service’s details you’ll soon see the games added to the overall library. The presentation ensures nothing looks out of place and icons are used throughout to indicate the source for games, data and achievements.

To make the best use of Galaxy 2.0 at this stage you might want to have all of the respective clients running at the same time so that they remain updated otherwise you can be caught out and have to wait before you play but that it actually works is quite cool. For users wanting to keep their environment lean, looking at the settings indicates that a future update to Galaxy will allow it to stop and start the other clients as needed so if you don’t mind the initial wait for games to load and update you’ll be covered too.

There’s still some features missing like Xbox Play Anywhere integration as well as legacy client things such as access to your GOG game extras (manuals, etc) but it’s still incredible to see just how well all of these different sources can be integrated into a single platform that puts the games first and the services on as close to an equal footing as possible.

My Steam library may be bigger but I do prefer how Galaxy presents its games and supports older titles so having it all together is the best of both worlds for me. 🙂