I‘ve checked a few of the resources I found here but I seem to be unable to wrap my head around this.
I want to play one specific game purchased from GoG on my Steam Deck. It only has a windows installer. I don’t need a fancy launcher (at the moment). The game has low hardware requirements so should run fine via emulation/proton…
What’s the easiest way to install and add this game to game mode?
Edit: clarification on the launcher. I don’t necessarily need one. If it is the easiest way to get it done I still would consider installing one.


Funnily enough I tried to do this with battlenet and it didn’t work but if I just run the original added installer on steam it auto runs properly
That’s because every time you run a new program with Proton on Steam it creates a new Wine-prefix (fake Windows drive). So when you run the installed battlenet.exe it creates a new Windows environment where Battle.net is not installed.
But the installer is using the environment where Battle.net is installed and apparently it has a function to run Battle.net when it detects that it’s already installed.
Unfamiliar with Battle.net, but the problem sounds like a case of DRM and the solution sounds like the installer tries to normalize launchers and you are able to leverage it.
I think I run guildwars1 off the original installer as well which also just autolaunches properly but I believe that installer has always properly supported launching an installed exe if found
Battlenet works just fine and I play StarCraft through it perfectly but I was totally stumped why following the instructions failed and running it off the installer works.
Neither even shows the installer it just directly runs the client