Looking for some tips and suggestions from the community 🙂

I’ve been looking at a cleaner way to run my other games, that aren’t from any digital stores. My current method looks like this for game management:

  1. Steam in Game mode for my Steam bought games
  2. Heroic for my GoG, Epic and Amazon collections, I’ve also used it to install EA App.
  3. Manually adding non-digital store games to Steam with by using “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library”

(I know Lutris is another option, but I never had a reason to use it).

I saw that Heroic has functionally to add other games to its UI for easier management. I decided to play with it today, because it would just seem neater to me to manage all other non-steam games via Heroic, and it can add shortcuts to Steam. Essentially merging option 2/3 together.

I tried adding 3 different retail games that I own, all of them previously worked perfectly when added manually directly to steam using option 3 above, and selecting Proton experimental in the compatilbity settings.

For the life of me, I cannot get any of them to work via Heroic. It doesn’t matter if I launch in the Heroic browser, or Steam game mode via the shortcut. I have been through various versions of Wine-GE, Proton - GE an Proton versions. Using Winetricks and adding any dependencies if required. Heroic tries to start the game, and then dies - everytime.

Anything that is started with Proton, just kicks out logs that end with:

Game Log:

fsync: up and running.

wine: RLIMIT_NICE is <= 20, unable to use setpriority safely

[S_API] SteamAPI_Init(): SteamAPI_IsSteamRunning() did not locate a running instance of Steam.

[S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed

Anything started with Wine-GE, produces logs that I don’t really understand but do still appear to be dependency-related.

Googling any of the issues in the Heroic launcher issues on Github brings back recommendations to not use Proton to launch games from Heroic as it’s the Steam tool, and use Wine-GE instead but my experience (maybe wrongly) is that things seem to work easier with Proton.

Long-post-short : Does anyone have any experience playing around with this? Is there anyway to have Heroic be your single point of truth for all non-steam Games but use Proton. Is there anything else I’m missing or any other suggestions.

Ultimately, I can just stick with adding games to steam but now I’m in the rabbit hole I’d like to try and work it out 😁

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!