Addition by subtraction can be very effective, especially when it comes to annoying game features. 2K announcing that the most annoying aspect of launching Civilization 6 will not make a return for Civ 7 has caused cheers throughout the community and will hopefully spur other publishers to follow suit.
We are, of course, talking about the 2K launcher, which has been a major thorn in the side of Civilization 6 players for years. Not only is it one of many seemingly unnecessary publisher launchers, but also one of the biggest of the bunch, prompting gamers to actively develop ways to circumvent it.
In some of the best news Civilization fans have heard in a while, the 2K launcher has been cut from Civ 6 on Steam via an update, with an upcoming patch aiming to do the same on the Epic store. What’s even better, this isn’t just a publicity stunt ahead of Civilization 7’s release, as that game won’t include the publisher’s custom launcher at all, bringing us all back to a time when you only needed to launch your game once for it to start.
The exciting news was shared with the community on Reddit, and the response was exactly as one would expect—fans falling on their knees out of joy in the middle of Walmart and praising lord Sid for his good deeds. The one thing anyone showed any concern over is the option to select which DirectX version you prefer to launch the game with upon launch, but that has now been moved over directly to Steam, further proving just how useless these external launchers are for the end user.
We desperately hope that game publishers, including 2K themselves, see this reaction and finally embrace the light. No one likes being dragged out of their main launcher to start the game they already bought within that ecosystem. No one likes having a dozen different publisher apps for each game they play. No one likes their PC performance being compromised for no good reason. No one likes publisher launchers.
Unfortunately, 2K has been so random with its own approach to this issue that we’d be shocked to see a major move away from the custom launchers. You only need to look at one of my favorite series, BioShock. The first couple of games don’t have the 2K launcher, but Infinite does, and so do the remastered versions of BioShock 1 and 2. Now, 2K has decided to pull the Civ 6 launcher after years of fans complaining about it, but for all we know, it may reintroduce it to Civ 7 six months after launch.
You really can’t make any logical conclusions because there’s not much logic to be found, but we’ll take Civ 6 and Civ 7 for the minor victory it is and pray that we see more of this in the future.
