Playnite Is Best Way to Save on Video Games

howtogeek.com:

The proliferation of game platforms has created an interesting (and money-wasting!) problem. It’s all too easy to forget you have a game and repurchase it on a different platform. Here’s how to avoid that.

Not every gamer will have this problem, but it’s incredibly common. Back when the only way to get your hands on PC games was to purchase them through Steam or buy a physical copy at your local retailer, it wasn’t too difficult to keep track of what you had. Further, back then in the veritable stone ages of game downloading and online platforms, console storefronts were underwhelming or didn’t even exist.

So when you went game shopping, either the game was already in your Steam library—and the one place you were shopping online, Steam, would tell you—or it was sitting on the shelf right by your computer. Pretty easy to keep things straight. Same thing with consoles. Unless you happened to be at Best Buy and you forgot you already bought the game, there was little chance you’d buy it twice. (Admittedly, that still happens to me sometimes—curse you, $10 clearance bin.)

But the game purchasing and delivery landscape has changed since the early days of Steam and strictly physical console games.

Now, PC gamers have so many places to buy games and more than a few of them are quite generous with the giveaways. Instead of just games on Steam, you might have those plus games on Epic Games, Humble Bundle, Good Old Games (GOG), Origin, Ubisoft Connect, Amazon Gaming, Itch.io. and more.

Add in all the console stores like the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation stores and you have even more game sources.

To further complicate it, if you stay on top of all those aforementioned generous game giveaways and freebies across the platforms you can