In the seemingly never-ending debut of new game launchers, Rockstar has joined the incessant collective with a launcher of its own. It's not entirely functional right now and a weird bug initially made it so that playing offline wasn't possible, but that now appears to have been fixed. Mostly.
The Rockstar Games Launcher debuted with a number of decent features, including cloud saves, automatic updates, and its own shopfront for buying Rockstar games through. Prices are identical to Steam, so there isn't a huge benefit to buying from the Rockstar store, especially if you enjoy Steam's more impressive feature set. But if you like the idea of more of your money going to Rockstar, then making your purchase through the new launcher lets you do that.
Whether you buy or just play games through the launcher, however, you'll need a Rockstar Social Club to login with. If you've played GTA V on the PC, you'll already have that, but if you're playing other Rockstar games you'll need to sign up for one. That gives you acces to the store and your own library, as well as the ability to share screenshots and videos, as well as in-game jobs and look for crews, all within the launcher itself.
All of this likely comes before the debut of Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PC, so we expect some much heavier social interaction from the launcher moving forward, as Rockstar use it as a way to advertise its own products to its expansive collection of game fans.
You can download the launcher directly from Rockstar, and if you do, you'll get a free PC copy of GTA San Andreas.
