Fan revolt forces RPG studio to kill its new launcher just 19 hours after release
Overview & Key Takeaways
Which you could probably have seen coming.
After an incredibly brief existence, Owlcat has completely rolled back a controversial new launcher from Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Introduced yesterday, the Owlcat Launcher was intended to be a pre-game space for collating news and updates about Owlcat's various games. "Instead of searching across multiple platforms for updates, news, and announcements, now you can find them all gathered in one convenient place whenever you launch the game," said the studio.
As (you would have thought) anyone could see coming, players hated it. Though Owlcat said it had taken pains to make the launcher as "unobtrusive" as possible—it required "no mandatory registration," said it did not collect player data, and could notionally be entirely turned off—players responded negatively. The Rogue Trader subreddit and Steam forum were immediately awash with complaints.
Partially, of course, that's for the simple reason that these sort of pre-game launchers are universally terrible: bloatware that's useless at best and intrusive at worst. But making matters worse was the fact that turning off the launcher did not, in fact, turn it off. It just made the launcher run invisibly.
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"Apparently if the launcher closed, the game stopped recording Steam time (because launcher ID is now how the game is recognized by default)," wrote Owlcat community manager Starrok in the Rogue Trader subreddit. In other words, if Steam didn't detect the launcher running, it wouldn't count your hours in the game. "The team decided to use this background process as a bandaid fix for that.
"I know VERY well how that looks, and unfortunately I was not informed about this change," continued Starrok. "I've already communicated with the team about this and tomorrow they will research how this time display issue can be resolved in a different way rather than leaving an unkilled process that eats up memory."
That was yesterday. Today, it seems that the solution Owlcat settled on was to obliterate the launcher entirely. "We are Rolling Back the Launcher," reads the title of a new announcement. "The game will now revert to the previous patch, completely removing any Launcher-related changes. Thank you for your feedback, and genuinely sorry for the frustration caused." Fans seem pleased.
All in all, the Owlcat Launcher lived for about 19 hours, which is slightly less than the life expectancy of an adult mayfly. It's not the studio's first controversy like this, either: back in 2023, fan pushback forced it to strip a data-sucking tool out of Wrath of the Righteous.
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Credit where it's due, plenty of studios would simply leave the offending tech in and ride out the wave of complaints. Opposite-of-credit where it's due, I can't imagine someone at Owlcat didn't know how this stuff would be received ahead of launch. Studio decision-makers should probably listen to them.
Anyway, I've reached out to Owlcat to ask if this is the final end for the launcher, or if it plans to bring it back in some form. I'll update this piece if I hear back.
