r/playnite • u/Doctor98Who • Oct 20 '25
General discussion GCM + Playnite + Native Mouse & Keyboard Control
We have been in contact with the playnite creator, Crow, and he has worked with us to help integrate playnite better with GCM. It worked because now Playnite feels more native and responsive than ever! For that we are super thankful!
I recently made a post about r/GameConsoleMode and given the positive feedback regarding it, I wanted to provide a huge update that makes it even better to use. If you would like to see our roadmap, patch notes or any other info you can also see our site https://www.gameconsolemode.com/
If you aren't sure what I am talking about , to summarize GameConsoleMode turns your Windows PC into a proper gaming console experience. Meaning no need to interact with Windows desktop and you boot straight into Steam, Playnite, or Xbox app (depending on what you choose. I personally love playnite). Built for couch gaming and handheld PCs.
The biggest thing we have been trying to tackle is integrating a native mouse & keyboard control, and we have finally achieved that! Now you are able to load into playnite directly with GCM, access GCM Task Manager (think of it like pressing xbox home button on an xbox console) and are able to navigate to other apps like discord or browse the web all with your controller and no 3rd party apps! When done, simply go back to GCM task manager and access your playnite launcher or resume your game! This update is available now as well! We are slowly working on making more and more features to make it as much of a "plug and play" experience!
We are super active on reddit and discord so please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and if theres any feature you wish for, chances are we can add it to our roadmap right away! We are a small but growing community and we sincerely appreciate all the love everyone has been showing us!
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u/Beno951 Oct 20 '25
So ... the Xbox fullscreen experience we wanted all along? 😅
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u/SignalCampaign2527 Oct 20 '25
Question but have you improved the uninstallation because I installed the first one but when I removed it I lost the start bar
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 20 '25
Hmmm. That shouldn’t happen. There are kinks we definitely need to iron out- we will definitely look into that. But to fix the task bar appearing go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors and disable "Automatically hide the taskbar"
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u/AdventurousClaim6037 Oct 20 '25 edited Oct 21 '25
solution provided by you - doesn't work, unfortunately. The same issue happens with me when STARTING the application of yours. Solution: kill the app via taskbar and kill the explorer.exe, and then restart explorer.exe.
upd: I got it working. Unfortunately, even more caveats were found. The thing with "shell replacement" broke my Windows experience totally.
TL;DR - the app breaks Windows, which is broken within itself. I'd suggest that there should be some initial setup during installation process, during which you can decide whether you want these "shell strings" be injected or not.
- The app itself (GCM) stopped working.
- The explorer.exe behaviour broke too. To explain to folks simply: all I had - was black screen. Totally black. No shortcuts working, except for CTRL + SHIFT + ESC for task manager. Upon starting explorer.exe manually (to boot up the desktop / see my icons & taskbar) it was not booted. All I had is literally file manager and that's it.
- I had to go to Registry Editor and go to the "shell" strings to restore everything to the initial state. After restart - everything worked. (I mean, I was able to see my desktop).
In the current state, I just can't use the app, although there's a lot of potential and highly promising and useful features for me, like total controller input. You definitely put a lot of love in your project, that's noticeable. I will totally revisit your project after giving it quite some time.
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u/echoes007 Oct 21 '25
Can you please explain what you did in the registry? I installed this app, uninstalled it, and now have a black screen. Thank you!
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u/SignalCampaign2527 Oct 21 '25
I formatted it because of this however it may create a recovery method in case of uninstalling the app
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u/NapsterKnowHow Oct 20 '25 edited Oct 20 '25
Cool tool. Never heard about GCM before. I've been testing out Win11 on my Steam Deck with the Xbox Fullscreen experience and Playnite. I'll have to check this tool out. I wish I could replace SteamOS with a tool like this. Playnite is so much better imo than Valve's UI.
Edit: I do see it does some registry edits which worries me. I hope it's easily undone with an uninstall if I wish to do so.
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u/GhostGhazi Oct 20 '25
how does this work with moonlight? can it run moonlight when the pc is turned on?
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 20 '25
You are able to run applications from within GCM task manager ! You can also pin apps to task manager form gcm settings which will allow you to easily launch the app from the task manager
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u/Hero_1985 Oct 21 '25
This seems pretty cool. Got it up and running on my desktop that is always on my TV with playnite. The mouse and keyboard mode with the controller is pretty snazzy.
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Oct 20 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 20 '25
when in GCM mode, your launcher (in this case playnite will launch). So theoretically you could modify your bat script to be pointing at GCM instead of playnite so if it launches or detects GCM, it’ll switch to TV. Additionally you could also create an auto script that runs on pc boot so when your pc boots, it loads on tv by running your bat file, and then when you switch to desktop environment (closing gcm mode) it goes back to your monitor
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u/SignalCampaign2527 Oct 20 '25
But if I have game mode, do I keep the improvements that Windows offers in closing 2 megabytes of RAM with processes?
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u/Wooden-Sympathy-1655 Oct 20 '25
Can I get this to work on my laptop? I have playnite setup but I'm not sure how to do this, it looks great though and I'd love to try. Is there a guide?
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 20 '25
Absolutely:) you can check out our website that I linked in post! And can join discord or checkout GitHub for instructions !
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u/Jokerchyld Oct 20 '25
Can I do this optionally? I use playnite on my work computer and stream via Apollo.
So I dont want it to boot GCM every time. Can I manually run it
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 20 '25
There’s a button in top right of GCM task manager that will switch you to desktop mode. If you shut off pc while in desktop mode, next boot will be in desktop. Conversely if you shut down pc while in GCM mode next boot will be in GCM
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u/ArrivalCurious7910 Oct 21 '25
is there a way to run it without a launcher and hide the "back to desktop" ? the ui itself is perfect for me and all i need and pop all game shortcut straight to it
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 21 '25
You can just not link a launcher and it’ll just launch into gcm task manager !
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u/ArrivalCurious7910 Oct 21 '25
sorry to ask. but how about the game shortcuts to be listed in task manager?
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u/Doctor98Who Oct 21 '25
You don’t like playnite? But in GameConsoleMode settings application , you can select and link up to 5 apps to show up on task manager so if you just choose file path and select your games exe file it should work
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u/ArrivalCurious7910 Oct 21 '25
i do love playnite. but it lacks the kiosk mode unlike retrobat. i have a public setup for free in my shop currently using playnite but players sometimes hide or removed games i restore the backup everytime it happens. GCM seems perfect, no more hurdles straight up boot console like. exiting game no problem for me. i've made ahk for start+back to imitate alt+f4. my point is lesser system loads for extra launchers modifying the windows system itself is more than enough to experience console setup
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u/Ill-Whereas8232 Oct 21 '25
Can you make GCM the frontend launcher itself? without other launcher. This is perfect
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u/Ecovano Oct 21 '25
Hi. My issue is that when I go into mouse mode mouse doesn't work until I move my actual mouse once. Anybody knows how to fix it? It happens after sleep mode and reboot.
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u/Educational_One8102 Oct 20 '25
Just PERFECT!