Enlarge / 2K's launcher does the important work of halting Midnight Suns from launching after you click "Play" on a green button in Steam so you can acknowledge their brand and click "Play" on a red button. (credit: Kevin Purdy)
Publisher-made game launchers are usually just a minor annoyance, a speed bump for those who just want to play the game they bought. 2K's launcher, popping up by default when you launch Firaxis' newest XCOM-meets-superhero-friendship Marvel's Midnight Suns, does something worse, hindering performance significantly for some players.
RockPaperShotgun's James Archer measured his higher-end PC's performance while playing Midnight Suns, both with the default 2K launcher left in place and with it bypassed through a Steam command option. Archer saw a nearly 62 percent improvement in average frames per second without the 2K launcher active. On a system with a Core i9-10900K, RTX 3090, and 32GB of DDR4 memory, running at 1400p with ray tracing and the graphic quality set to "Epic," Archer's average frames per second jumped from 90 fps to 146. The only difference was disabling a launcher that essentially reminds you who published the game, markets other titles to you, and requires more clicks.
I'm playing through Midnight Suns myself and had noticed some aggravating stutter, especially when streaming the game for couch-based TV play. I turned on Steam's built-in FPS counter, then compared performance between sessions both with and without the 2K launcher running. I'm running a decidedly lower-end system than the one tested by RockPaperShotgun: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X, RTX 3050, and 16GB of DDR4 memory. I am, however, playing at 3840×2160 resolution, with graphics set to "High."