Blaugust 2022 – Playnite – Keeping Your Game Libraries Organized
Posted on August 12, 2022 by Aywren
If you’re anything like me, you probably have too many games scattered across too many platforms to keep up with. I noted in my post about playing 70% of my Steam backlog that I was aware that Steam is now just a sliver of all the games I own anymore.
So how does anyone keep up with all these different libraries – Steam, itch, Epic, Origin, Humble, etc?
A few months back, Xaa introduced me to a program that can help with that called Playnite.
At first, it seemed too good to be true. A program that could rope in information from ALL of my gaming libraries? Yes, please!
However, in order to do this, I had to connect my other game libraries to allow it access to information about my games and sync them. I was a little iffy about this at first. But after doing some research into the program, it seems that Playnite is considered safe.
Privacy Statement
Playnite doesn't store any user information and you don't need to provide any information to import installed games. Account connection process is usually done via official login web forms and only the web session cookies or tokens are stored, the same way when you login to those services via the web browser.
All information about your library is stored locally on your PC.
After using Playnite for a while, I haven’t seen anyone stealing my accounts (not to mention they’re locked down behind 2Factor where they can be), so I feel like it’s safe to recommend this now.
What It Does
What impresses me about Playnite is not only does it rope in all information about all the games in your various libraries, but it also pulls in game information. You see things like how long you’ve played, the last time you’ve played, the game’s description and artwork – it’s much more thorough than I expected.
I really like that it keeps track of information about Game Pass games I’ve played since this can be far more nebulous information to find. I haven’t seen a place in the Game Pass UI that tells me, for example, how long I’ve played a game. But I can find that information here!
What’s more, it looks like you can directly install and launch games from Playnite if you want – though I haven’t tried this yet. Which honestly means you could use this as a launcher for every platform.
Note – itch.io only seems to register the games you’ve added to a collection or played before. I own thousands of games (thanks to bundle purchases there), and it doesn’t count what I haven’t sorted through and added to my library yet.
Note 2 – It seems like adding Humble can result in duplicates. Many of the games I have from Humble Bundles I’ve redeemed on Steam. But they still show up under Humble as well, which means they’re in my game list twice. I decided it was better just to remove my Humble account to prevent this.
It’s also a great tool that lets me know if I already own a game before I accidentally re-purchase it somewhere else! It’s so hard to tell now days if I have something from a bundle, or if it’s in my want-to-play list on Game Pass, or maybe I picked that game up as a free promotion on Epic or Prime Gaming.
Before I buy, I search Playnite. No need to be spending money twice.
Awesome Statistics
If you enjoy statistics, Playnite will tickle your fancy. You can see everything about your entire game library. And if you take the time to manually update and edit games in your library, you can get more specific… such as which games you’ve not just played but “beaten” or games you’ve “abandoned.”
You can also filter your stats to see lots of information. For example, here I filtered by Source to see the games I’ve played most on Game Pass.
So if feeling bad about your Steam backlog isn’t enough, here’s another way to measure your game library’s worth as a whole.