Hi Pdx,
since you're investing money in this thing I would like to give my crude honest personal feedback.
I don't like launchers. Their sole purpose is to separate me from my game with an additional click.
Settings, mods, friends and everything that belongs to the game should be in the game. And it's not like I'm going to change them that often that I need to be reminded about them every time I want to play.
News, forum posts, discussions and such are interesting and I'm an avid consumer of these forums. But really: when I want to play EU4 I just want to play EU4. I don't need a news feed or join discussion link. Not at the expense of an additional click to get my game at least. And you know it. That's why you have the continue from last save button there. It's a workaround to a disruption you deliberately created. Why not use this chance to get rid of the disruption all together?
I welcome your company wide infrastructure efforts. The cross system multiplayer infrastructure above all.
Also the "friends" things, the save cloud infrastructure, mod portal and distribution center... your own steam client that is. Even though I know I will continue to use Steam because it works and probably will always work better (they do this as their main job after all, so they are pros) I appreciate you work to bring these features to players that don't want to use Steam. Everybody has his own tastes and as a big software house should do you work to support everyone.
Just don't make things that more or less work worse than they are now. Game specific launchers are bad enough. And now you work on a glorified one? And don't event try to make a pdx version of uPlay or Origin in the way when trying to play a game. Those DRM made me abandon those companies. Forever (yes: never spent a single cent of their stuff ever since). Usability wide my PDX games work fine as they are and the only problem I have with them is that when I start them I need to go through a launcher. It is M$ usability school: "Do your really want play this game?" -> "OK","Cancel". "You know what? If I didn't want to play this game I wouldn't had click on its icon in the first place!" This kind of stuff should have disappeared in the nineties.
Think about it. I'm of the idea that the best service for your customers is to get rid of launchers... Or at the very least make them optional.