Whatever happened to launchers on PC?

Whatever happened to launchers on PC?
I love being able to set up things before going into the actual game. Should I mistakenly open a game, it's no problem since the launcher starts first.
You can always have a "quicklaunch" option that can be enabled. Why do people not bother anymore?
Let's talk about launchers and games that have launchers.

The most recent game I remember having those was fallout 4.
As to why they went away, I'm going to go with steam. Many devs just started counting on it, that's just the sad truth of the matter.

many unity games i tried had launchers with resolution and general graphic quality options

afaik all paradox games got em

All Matrix/Slitherine Games and even those Paradox Games have them.

suddenly keygen music

many games had or still have two exe files in their directories, one for launching straight to game and second is launcher in which you can do your usual launcher stuff

very unnecessary as game engines improved and became more capable at swapping core game assets and had better support for game engine changes that wouldn't require a restart of the executable. They're a relic really, and if you're concerned about having your PC locked down while a game struggles to launch, throw away your computer and build a new one.

alternatively: boohoo the industry is dead crash when boo hoo

I still see "game must restart for changes to take effect" all the time though, plus an out of game launcher is a great backup plan should any of the settings become incompatible for some reason and cause the game to fail to load/blackscreen. Much better than delete the config file/reinstall

Are you gonna cry about "entitled gaymers" next or what?

The main purpose of launchers, and separate configuration programs, was to allow the user to configure settings, particularly graphical settings, before the game loads. Dynamically changing graphical settings while the game is running can be annoying to program around (to this day most engines require a restart to change MSAA settings), and it was easier to hack together a configuration GUI with old school Windows GUI than implementing more menus and custom widgets in game. But over time people came to expect that they could change all of these settings at runtime, and once this was commonplace in engines, there was no reason to keep the launcher around.

editing config files that most typically store game/application settings should be an enforced basic skill, anything that might force people to learn these basic skills is a good thing. launchers are very unnecessary and can range from "just fucking run the game already" to "holy shit why did they use these god awful sounds in this vb gui its so fucking loud" in how annoying they can be.

at their best they are a windows drop down menu, but even then, in-game settings are better. Still wish more games copied the source style approach of a windowed menu.


bloo bloo

Is your shift key broken or your brain?

cry hard nigger

That's a yes.

...

So is english not your first language or what?

Insults are far from arguments.

Thanks for the answer.

Love you capitalization autist.

If I recall, Sonic games still have launchers.

Steam happened. PC gaming is now for the tech illiterates.

Haha consoles are just cheap PCs! No PCs are just expensive consoles.

I bet most Steam users wouldn't even know how to mount an ISO or manually patch something. Now get of my lawn my Thai nurse is here with my meds.