Questions worth answering properly

No. A junction is resolved by Windows inside the file system, below the level any application can see. Your launcher opens the path it recorded and gets the files from the other drive. Launching, updating, verifying game files and uninstalling all work exactly as before, because as far as your launcher is concerned nothing changed.

Your games keep working. A junction is a plain Windows feature, so a game that was moved still launches from its new drive with GameHydra gone. Uninstalling does not bring games back on its own: if you want every game back on the drive it was installed on, press Bring everything home first, then uninstall.

The games on that drive become unavailable until you plug it back in, in the same way they would if you had installed them there directly. The junction remains and resolves again as soon as the drive returns. GameHydra will not move new games onto a drive it cannot see, and it flags any game whose drive is missing rather than letting the launcher fail silently.

Games are only ever moved whole, never split across drives, and a game that is running, or that its launcher is still installing or updating, is never moved. Saves are safe either way: a game that keeps its saves inside its own folder moves with them, and the junction means the game still finds them at the path it expects. Saves kept outside the game folder, including Steam Cloud, are not touched at all.

Steam, Epic Games, GOG Galaxy, EA app and Ubisoft Connect. They are all sorted together, on the same drives and by the same rules, with nothing to set up beyond ticking them. A game installed under Program Files is moved with Move as administrator, and Windows asks for permission when it happens.

No. Standard is a one-time purchase that covers up to three PCs at once, and the free plan needs no licence at all.

No. GameHydra works with the NTFS drives you already have. HydraDrive is optional hardware we’re designing for later, with no price or date yet.

Steam can move a game to another library folder, but then that game lives on the other drive as far as Steam is concerned, and you do it manually one game at a time. GameHydra keeps every game addressed from your main library and decides which drive it should physically sit on based on how recently you played it. On Standard that happens without you doing anything.

Compression is only applied to games you have not played recently, and it uses LZX, which is built into Windows. Windows decompresses on read, so a compressed game still runs. GameHydra fully decompresses a game when you launch it again, so a game you have returned to is not left running compressed.

It sits in the tray and starts with Windows, which is how automatic sorting happens. If you close it, nothing breaks: the junctions are ordinary NTFS features and keep working whether or not the app is running.

Three at once — enough for a desktop, a laptop and a spare without thinking about it. If you need a fourth, release one from your account and activate the new machine; that is free and instant. Reinstalling Windows or swapping a drive on a PC you already activated does not use up another slot. The free plan has no licence at all, so you can run that on as many machines as you like.

If you bought directly from this site, yes — a full refund within 14 days, no reason needed. Email support and Paddle returns it to the payment method you used. After 14 days a purchase is final unless GameHydra will not work on your machine and we cannot make it work, in which case write in however long it has been. Refunding a licence revokes it, so the key can no longer be activated. If you bought on Steam, Valve handles the refund and going to them directly is faster than emailing us.

The same app, whichever storefront you use. What changes is how the licence reaches you. Buying on Steam uses your Steam account as the licence, so there is no key to enter. Buying here or on itch.io emails you a licence key to activate in the app. Activating needs an internet connection once; after that GameHydra checks the licence on your PC against a signed token and works fully offline.

No. Junctions are an NTFS feature, so both the drive your launcher installs to and the drive a game moves to have to be NTFS. exFAT and FAT32 drives cannot be used as destinations. Network drives and mapped network locations are not supported either.

Email support@bytesizefactory.dev and a person will reply. If a move failed, your game is still at its original location — that is the failure mode the app is built around. Include what you were doing and which drives are involved.