Keeping one game library across Steam, Xbox, Epic and GOG
Games bought in four places do not have to live in four launchers. Here is how to bring them together, and what to watch out for.
By Hasnain Butt Akhtar, founder and developer ·
Most PC collections are now spread across four or five storefronts, each with its own launcher that wants to start with Windows and sit in the tray. You do not have to live like that. A single library view is straightforward to set up, and it changes how often you actually play the things you own.
Why the collection scattered in the first place
None of this was anyone's plan. Steam came first for most people. Then a game was exclusive to Epic for a year, or came free with a graphics card, or was bought on GOG because it was DRM free, or arrived with a Game Pass subscription. Each purchase was sensible on its own, and the result is a collection nobody can see all of at once.
The practical cost is not the disk space. It is that you forget what you own. Games bought in a sale sit unplayed in a launcher you open twice a year, and you buy something new instead.
Three ways to solve it
The approaches differ in how much work they need and how much they can actually do.
| Approach | How it works | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Add games to Steam manually | Steam lets you add any program as a non Steam game, which puts a shortcut in your Steam list | A handful of extra titles, if you already live in Steam |
| A dedicated library app | A separate program scans your drives, finds installed games from each store, and presents them in one place | Collections spread across three or more stores |
| Shortcuts in a folder | A plain Windows folder of shortcuts, pinned to the Start menu | People who want no extra software at all |
The manual Steam approach works, but it has a specific limitation worth knowing before you invest an evening in it. Added games appear as generic entries. You supply the artwork yourself, playtime tracking is unreliable for anything that hands off to another launcher, and the Steam overlay often will not attach. It is fine for a few titles and frustrating for forty.
What a library app can and cannot do
This is where expectations usually need adjusting, so it is worth being precise.
It can find your installed games automatically, because each store records what it has installed in a predictable place on your drive. It can show them all in one grid with proper cover art, let you search across every store at once, group them into collections you define, and record how long you played and when. It can launch anything with one click, handing off to the right storefront underneath.
It cannot get around the storefront itself. Launching a Steam game still starts Steam, because Steam has to be running for the game to run. The same is true of the others. What changes is that you no longer have to remember which store a game came from, or keep every launcher open to browse.
It also cannot show you games you own but have not installed, unless it signs into your accounts to read your purchase history. This is the main fork in the road when choosing one, and it is worth a moment's thought.
The account question
Library apps take one of two approaches, and neither is wrong.
Some ask you to sign in to each storefront. In return they can show your entire purchase history, including things you have never installed, and often your friends and achievements too. The cost is that you have handed another program access to those accounts, and your library data lives on someone else's server.
Others read only what is installed on the machine. They need no accounts and no sign in, and nothing about your collection leaves the computer. The trade off is that a game you bought in 2019 and never installed will not appear, because there is nothing on the drive to find.
Which suits you depends on whether you want a catalogue of everything you own, or a front end for everything you can actually play right now. If you mostly want to stop forgetting about installed games, the second approach is simpler and asks less of you.
Setting it up so it stays tidy
- Install games where they can be found. If you keep games on a second drive, make sure each storefront knows about that location as a library folder. Anything installed outside a registered folder is easy for a scanner to miss.
- Do the artwork once. Cover art is what makes a unified library pleasant rather than a list of file names. Most library apps fetch it automatically, but a few obscure titles will need doing by hand. It is worth twenty minutes, once.
- Build collections around when you play, not what genre it is. Genre groupings look neat and get used rarely. Groupings like Quick session, With friends, Controller on the sofa, and Finish this one get used constantly, because they match the actual question you are asking when you sit down.
- Turn off the other launchers at startup. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes the difference. Each storefront has a setting to stop it launching with Windows. Once your library app is doing the browsing, they only need to start when a game needs them. Your boot time will thank you.
- Check hidden and duplicate entries after the first scan. Demos, betas, tools, and games installed twice from different stores all show up. Five minutes of hiding things at the start saves you scrolling past them for a year.
The bit that surprises people
Once everything is visible in one place, most people discover they own considerably more than they thought. Collections of two or three hundred games are common, and a large share have never been started.
Playtime history is worth turning on for the same reason. Not to feel guilty about the unplayed pile, but because seeing that you put ninety hours into something you had half forgotten is a better guide to what to buy next than any recommendation engine. It is your own data, it is more accurate than any algorithm, and if it stays on your machine it costs you nothing to keep.
Whatever you choose, the test is simple. If you can sit down, see everything you own in one place, and start playing in two clicks without thinking about which shop it came from, the setup is working. If you are still opening three launchers to check what you have, it is not.