Free software that you'll love if you're a gamer
If you are passionate about gaming and you are looking for the best free programs to improve your experience while you play, you can't miss the following list with some of the best software available for every gamer out there.
Steam is probably the largest videogames digital store in the world, and we can't really say how amazing and essential is its app for any desktop gamer. Besides from access to the huge catalog of both free and paid games, the application will become the launcher for your games library, where you can launch, download, and view different statistics about your gaming history while chatting with your contacts.
In addition to the Steam app, you can always use Pin More to create dynamic (and beautiful) tiles shortcuts for each of your games in the windows start menu.
Enhanced Steam is a browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge that gives you a new Steam on steroids experience, endowing the platform with new features such as multiple new wishlists sorting options or price comparisons according to different regions.
GOG GALAXY is another amazing game launcher that helps you to buy and update your video games library. Some of its features include syncing saves, built-in Rollback to restore your game to prior states, In-game overlay, achievements, crossplay between GOG and Steam, and Multiplayer & matchmaking.
Playnite is a video game library with the ability to import titles from several major gaming platforms such as Steam , EA App , GOG.com , Microsoft Store , and Ubisoft Connect services. Plus, its customizable interface, portable installation and wide variety of console emulators support, make it a very valuable companion to your gaming habits.
This tool it's a disk analizer and cleaning tool that let you know exactly and in detail what's on your hard drive, and show you statistics in an interactive graphical form, categorized by color and size, so you can choose whatever you want and find out exactly what it is and where it is located, and being able to optimize your disk by deleting temporary files from games or other programs and recover wasted space.
Although a bit older, SpaceSniffer is a good alternative if you want to try something similar to WinDirStat
Nexus Mod is one of the largest modder communities in the network, with more than 500 games supported, among which you can find titles like The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher , Fallout , Dragon Age , Dark Souls and many more.
Its intuitive Mod Manager allows you to download, install, manage and keep updated the mods of each of your installed games. If you want one of the great advantages of PC gaming, you should use Nexus Mod without any doubt.
Have you always wanted to change your keyboard layout? So then KeyTweak is just about the perfect tool for you. Extremely user friendly, allows you to re map any single key so that it'll do what you want it to do. Very simple tool that avoids having to mess with the registry in a very simple way.
Discord is a very popular voice and text chat system for gamers. It allows you to communicate with people who are playing the same games as you, giving you the possibility of creating free servers to host the discussions of the community in question.
The fact that it's lightweight, low latency, minimum CPU use, custom hotkeys, multiple channels, and In-game overlay, make it the perfect tool for communication between gamers. Give it to try if you're done with Skype or TeamSpeak
Free overclocking tool that works on both Nvidia and AMD Graphic cards. This great and extensive program does an excellent job in giving you a huge range of options to optimize the performance of the most demanding games, as well as giving you the possibility to monitor various statistics such as GPU Use, GPU Temperature, Fans speed, FPS, etc. However, beware that you'll need a good cooling system and a little knowledge on what you are doing in order to not exceed the limits of your video card too much and preserve its useful life.
If you're into streaming or you have planned to start with Twitch or Mixer, OBS Studio will be your ideal work partner. This software not only allows you to record the screen of your computer, but also allows you to put together different videos from different sources and have several video outputs in the same streaming, having the possibility of setting up different cameras or scenes and switch between them according to what you need or want, in addition to adjust the amount of FPS of your camera. You can add GIF, animations, transitions, videos and much more manually or automatically, while you easily monitor what your viewers see, and decide what they will see next.
If your computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements, you can always use the old version of OBS
This program does an amazing job when it comes to organizing, backup, transfer and even restore your game saves, without the need to create different folders manually. If you play on different PCs, or want to keep your games synchronized wherever you go, GameSaver is a must have! Especially if you format your computer regularly, your saves will always be safe and ready.
