Historically, the GGZ approach to consistent multiplayer games on the desktop was to offload all the non-game specific tasks like login, chat and game start into special applications called core clients. After a while, this turned out to be a terrific idea but it contradicted the behaviour of most players. Their usual workflow is to start the game first and then switch to online mode rather than the other way around. For some time now, all the necessary components to allow this alternative path have been available for Gtk+ game integration, but no such widget framework has existed for KDE. (In all fairness, the first game ever with embedded core client support was Widelands which uses SDL.)

This is now changing: With the introduction of the classes GameCoreClient and KGGZCoreLayer, games can easily integrate either an off-the-shelf multiplayer control panel with a list of players and running games, or pieces thereof through the lower-level EmbeddedCoreClient class. Both widgets and standard actions like connect to game as spectator or launch new game are supported by this framework. A number of technological goodies like social gaming are thus also becoming available with only few lines of code in the game clients.