When I was growing up in the 2000s and 2010s, building a huge digital library of music was incredibly important to me. In that process, I got really into a bunch of freeware music library apps like Foobar2000 and MusicBee – if you know, you know.
While that was mostly just to have a lightweight program that I could play my entire music library regardless of codec, PC gaming is at a point where it needs a better library manager.
Pretty much every hardware manufacturer has tried to solve this by bundling library aggregation apps with hardware – just look at the Asus Armoury Crate or Legion Space. This is also what Microsoft is trying to do with its Full Screen Experience for the Xbox Ally X, working in every library into the Xbox App.
All of these programs have a problem, though. They're closed-source and won't let you interact with games that aren't already installed. Luckily, Playnite exists and is an open-source library app that'll let you import all of your games regardless of where you got them.
The Problem With PC Games
The beautiful thing about PC gaming is that it's a decentralized platform. You don't have to only get games through some official store like you do with a console like the PS5. While Steam is at the point where it's essentially the default PC games store, there are countless places to actually get your games.
In a lot of ways, that's awesome – the idea is that this competition should make all of these disparate launchers and stores better, even if that's not exactly reflected in reality all the time. But after 20 years of building up a PC games libary, I have something like 5,000 games across Steam, GOG, Battle.net, and a host of other random stores. In the past, that meant that when I wanted to play something I had to try and remember which store I bought it on, and then run it. Now, Playnite has completely changed the way I interact with my library.
How It Works
When you first install Playnite, it'll run you through a dialog where you have to select all the library integrations you want to use. It defaults to just seven, but even if you don't see some obscure app you enjoy, there's probably a community-made plugin that'll let you integrate that as well.
Then, it'll download all of the necessary plugins for those libraries and it'll have you sign into those accounts one by one. That does seem a little sketchy, but the Playnite page insists that none of the information is stored anywhere, and it's essentially the same as signing into your account on a browser. Luckily, most of these stores have APIs just for this kind of thing.
After you're signed in to everything, the program will pull your library data from the various APIs to populate your Playnite library. (In my case, with a reasonably gigantic library, this took something like 20 minutes the first time.) Then, it'll try and pull metadata for each of these games. By default it will use the Internet Games Database, but even if you don't want to use that, there are also plugins for different metadata libraries – I even found one for IGN!
Sometimes the metadata will be off, but you can right click any game, hit edit and fill in your own metadata, along with custom art for the cover image.
Once everything is imported, you're good to just use the library like that. You can launch any installed gameright from Playnite, but more importantly, anything that's not installed, you can hit 'Install' and it'll open the respective launcher and start the download for you. This process works better for some launchers than others, but I have found that it works perfectly for Steam, Epic, and Battle.net, and those are the ones I use the most anyways.
All About the Customization
Once you have everything set up, Playnite looks pretty plain. It's essentially just a library that you can scroll through with a bunch of (admittedly useful) filters to find exactly what you're looking for.
But it doesn't have to stay simple – you can customize it however you want. On the off chance you're familiar with building themes, you can do it yourself, but there are also dozens of predesigned ones you can download from the community – and they're all free.
I've been using Playnite now for something like six months and I'm still finding new things to add to it. I found a HowLongToBeat plugin that displays how long each game in my library is. I found a plugin that just displays which games are currently on PC Game Pass, which will also just let me add them to my Playnite Library or open the Xbox app to view directly.
I even found a game activity plugin that'll graph out my game time by day, week, or even which library I'm playing the most – it even has a Gantt view for some reason! There are just so many different things I can do with this program that it's become even more useful than Steam.
That deep level of personalization is the major thing a lot of third-party launchers have been missing out on, after all. Steam got as big as it did largely because it was useful for more than just launching your games. And while Valve focused on building up a community, Playnite is focused on just letting people create their own little PC gaming environment.
It worked on me; Playnite has become one of the default apps I install on any new gaming PC, and now I genuinely don't want to live without it. Maybe that's specifically because I love tinkering with metadata and curating my digital library. But, hey, I'm a digital media enthusiast from the 2000s. We were all just kind of like that.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
