PC Gamers Win – 2K Removes their Pointless launcher from its PC games

A villain defeated – The 2K game launcher is no more!

PC Gamers and hating unnecessary game launchers; name a more iconic duo. 2K has announced that they have removed their infamous 2K Launcher from their entire game catalogue. Now, gamers can launch directly into their games. This makes playing affected games a much simpler process.

Over the years, 2K’s game launcher has had its issues. There have been times when the launcher has broken a game’s Linux support. Furthermore, there have also been times when the launcher has caused games to perform worse. At a minimum, the launcher wasted users’ time; at worst, it actively made 2K’s games worse.

Games affected by this change include Bioshock 1/2 Remastered, Bioshock Infinite, The Quarry, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Civilization 5/6, the Mafia Trilogy Definitive Edition, XCOM 2, and XCOM Chimera Squad.

As of November 18, 2024, the 2K Launcher has been removed from every game that used it on Epic and Steam. Additionally, we also removed the “2K Launcher Beta”, a completely separate launcher, from Sid Meier’s Civilization V.

– 2K Games

Now, playing 2K Games from Steam or other launchers is a simpler process. Now, PC gamers aren’t using a launcher to launch another launcher. Props to 2K for realising that their launcher was unnecessary and for taking action to remove it. It would be nice for other PC publishers to follow suit. I’m looking at you EA and Ubisoft!

You can join the discussion on 2K retiring their useless game launcher on the OC3D Forums.