A New PC Game Launcher Was So Hated, It Lasted Less Than 24 Hours

A new PC launcher added to Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader and intended to be a hub for all of developer Owlcat Games' various RPGs was met with disdain from players, prompting Owlcat to remove it less than 24 hours later.  In a post on Steam from June 22, Owlcat outlined the reasoning behind adding a launcher to the almost three-year-old game. It cited a need for the launcher as a way to keep its players up to date with news and updates to its various games, like Rogue Trader, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and upcoming projects like Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. Owlcat said according to its research, a large number of those who played Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous had never heard of Rogue Trader, despite them both being similar CRPGs. That was a problem. "This, upon reflection, is understandable--in this age of information overload, it's incredibly easy to miss even news that might be of interest," Owlcat said. "Therefore, we felt we really needed an effective cross-promotion tool for all our titles." A look at the short lived Owlcat launcher. In that same blog, Owlcat vowed to make the launcher as "unobtrusive as possible," and said it would be lightweight, wouldn't collect player data, wouldn't require players to register an account, and perhaps most importantly, could be opted out of. An option in the settings would allow players to simply switch the launcher off and launch the game as usual. Despite Owlcat's intentions, player feedback was largely negative. The post received no upvotes on Steam and thousands of mostly critical comments. The situation grew even worse once players realized that opting out and bypassing the launcher didn't actually stop it from running in the background.  In a post on the Rogue Trader subreddit, Owlcat community manager Starrok attempted to shine some light on the situation and explained that the launcher continued to operate in the background in order for Steam to properly record game time. Without the launcher, Steam would no longer track game-time played, and so the choice was made to have it operate in the background as a "Band-aid fix." Starrok said they were not aware of this prior to the update going live. "If the launcher is turned off, it's supposed to stay off and this is NOT an expected behaviour," Starrok said.  Less than 24 hours later, another blog post from Owlcat appeared, announcing it would be reverting Rogue Trader to a previous update and removing the launcher in its entirety. "Thank you for your feedback, and genuinely sorry for the frustration caused," the post stated.  Owlcat's is currently working on several different projects, including "multiple new unannounced RPGs already in production," according to its launcher blog post. A new DLC for Rogue Trader, The Infinite Museion, released June 11. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is slated to arrive in 2027, while Dark Heresy does not yet have a release date.