As of November 25, the 2K launcher is no longer required in any 2K published games on either Steam of Epic Games Store.

The 2K Launcher has been removed from every game that had used it on the Epic Games Store and Steam, according to a support page for the launcher that 2K updated this week.

"As of November 18, 2024, the 2K Launcher has been removed from every game that used it on Epic and Steam," said 2K. "Additionally, we also removed the “2K Launcher Beta”, a completely separate launcher, from Sid Meier’s Civilization V.

Secondary launchers for a game can be rather irritating. Clicking play via Steam or Epic and then having to click play again is a champagne problem, if we're being honest, but it's one that 2K has gone ahead and removed for us, making our PC-playing lives that much easier.

Borderlands and Civilization publisher 2K Games has quietly done something very cool and good: The company has removed the need to use its 2K PC launcher from all of its games, and sunset the software completely.

K Games has pulled its launcher from all its PC games as part of a “complete sunset” of the software, which means PC gamers can now launch all 2K games directly in Steam. The 2K Launcher was forced upon players of the company’s PC games,

Among all the unnecessary PC game launchers forced on us over the years, 2K Games’ version easily ranked among the very worst – when it was not clunky or broken all by itself, it always found ways to prevent you from enjoying your favorite games the way you wanted to.