Heroic Games Launcher

Hydra Launcher

Hydra Launcher is a free, open-source gaming platform built to be a single tool for managing, downloading, and launching a PC game library. It centralizes game discovery and library organization in one place, adds a built-in downloader client, and lets players track achievements, save progress to the cloud through Hydra Cloud, and see what friends are currently playing through user profiles. The project is fully open source under the MIT license and built with Electron, React, TypeScript, Python, and Rust, with active development on GitHub and builds available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Community-made themes can be downloaded to customize the launcher's look, and a recommendation system helps surface new games to try.

Playnite

Playnite is a free and open-source video game library manager for Windows that consolidates installed and owned games from Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, EA App, Ubisoft Connect, Battle.net, Xbox, and emulated titles into a single browsable collection. Instead of replacing each storefront's launcher, it detects and imports libraries from them and launches games through their original platform. The interface is fully themeable, from simple color tweaks to complete custom layouts, and a controller-friendly fullscreen mode is built in for couch or handheld use. Its plugin ecosystem, with dozens of community-built add-ons, extends metadata scraping, additional store integrations, and emulator auto-detection, and the project is developed with no telemetry, ads, or hidden costs.

Lutris

Lutris is an open-source video game preservation platform for Linux that brings together Wine, Proton, and dozens of emulators, including MAME, Dolphin, RetroArch, and ScummVM, behind a single launcher interface. It can sync game libraries from Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, and Humble Bundle through an optional lutris.net account, and it uses community-maintained JSON and YAML install scripts to automate setup for games and emulators that would otherwise require manual configuration. Beyond installation, Lutris lets users configure per-game runners and Wine versions, apply Vulkan-based performance tuning, and manage everything from a command-line interface as well as the GUI. It is entirely free and licensed under GPL-3.0, with an optional Patreon supporting ongoing development. As a Linux-only tool, it is commonly used both to play Windows games without a native Linux release and to preserve older titles through emulation.