Samsung has never joined the gaming phone market niche, but that doesn't mean the company doesn't care about mobile gaming. On the contrary, Samsung is helping developers create mobile games with ray-tracing-enabled graphics and games optimized for Galaxy phones and tablets. The company even launched the Gaming Hub cloud-enabled streaming service and developed its own mobile game launcher for One UI.
The Game Launcher will be this week's topic at SamMobile. As usual for our Samsung Week series, a new week starts with an overview of the app or service we'll be diving into over the next few days. Without further ado, here's what you need to know about Samsung's Game Launcher, and why you might end up using and loving it.
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Game Launcher is a mobile gamer's playground
In as few words as possible, Game Launcher is an app that can hold all your game app icons. In that sense, it's analogous to a shelf for your mobile games. However, there's a lot more to it than that, as you'll learn throughout the week. For now, here's a quick overview of the Game Launcher's main features:
- Instant Plays. These are small games that don't need to be downloaded from the Galaxy Store or Play Store before they can be played.
- Galaxy ranking: a ranking system that lets you see which games are the most popular and download them with a tap of a button.
- Events.
- Discord integration.
- Creature Collection: A minigame built into the Game Launcher that lets you track and gain achievements in a fun and engaging way.
- Game Booster integration. This feature lets you tweak various device settings that will be in effect exclusively when you play mobile games.
- A Priority Mode that helps you stay totally focused on your games.
- A Game Sound toggle that allows you to mute game sounds without affecting the volume of other sounds.
- Bookmarks: A way to add any app shortcuts to the Game Launcher. Useful if you want quick access to the Play Store, Galaxy Store, streaming apps, or others.
- Game notifications: An area where you can see all your game notifications, sorted by date or game. You can have game notifications be shown only in this section, preventing them from showing in the standard notification panel in One UI.
- Gaming Timeline: a timeline showing which games you have installed and uninstalled and when.
Join us throughout the next few days for Samsung Game Launcher Week, and we'll explore some of these features in greater depth and, ultimately, why you should use the Game Launcher instead of launching your mobile games from the home screen or the apps drawer.
Editor Note: Game launchers can be an annoyance more often than not, and you're likely well aware of this if you've had experience with them on the Windows platform. However, companies can sometimes get game launchers right in ways that make them useful. From personal experience with game launchers on different platforms, Samsung's Game Launcher falls in the “fun and useful” category rather than being a burden.
