Playnite

One cost of buying games today is seven launchers on your PC — each starting with Windows, each wanting updates, each promoting its own store. Playing something means first recalling which one you bought it from.

Playnite solves exactly that: one interface, all your games. It connects to the major platforms (authorized locally, with nothing routed through a third-party server), imports your libraries, and fills in cover art, release year, genre, description and playtime synced from each platform. Launching a game calls the appropriate launcher in the background so you never go hunting.

Emulators and local games join the same library — point it at your emulator paths and console ROMs sit on the same shelf as AAA titles from Steam. For anyone who plays both old and new games, that coherence is genuinely pleasant.

Notable extras:

• Fullscreen mode: a large-type interface built for controllers, so a TV-connected PC browses and launches games much like a console's system menu. Ideal for a living-room machine.
• Plugin ecosystem: the community has built achievement displays, price trackers, extra metadata sources and themes, installable from an in-app add-on browser.
• Fully usable offline: skip the online platforms entirely and manage only local and emulated games if you prefer.

Limits, stated plainly:

• Windows only. macOS and Linux users are out; on Linux, consider Lutris or Heroic instead.
• Importing platform libraries requires signing into those accounts through its embedded browser window, as the platforms demand. Playnite itself requires no account.
• The first metadata scrape of a large library takes a while.

MIT-licensed, 13,749 stars, maintained by its author for years, currently at version 10.56.