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Title: how to force steam to use the exe you tell it to under proton
ExpandingMan 3 May 2023
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I am trying to bypass the idiot launcher for Age of Wonders 4, because, of course the game works perfectly fine but the launcher crashes. (I have harsh words for the morons at publishers who tell everyone they need the game to have a launcher.) I would like to fix steam so that I can just use my "Age of Wonders 4" game icon to play the game, rather than a separate one.

Anyway, I tried following the advice [here](https://libreddit.totaldarkness.net/r/Steam/comments/jpgfzh/can_i_make_steam_open_a_different_exe_file/) to force steam to run the executable `AOW4.exe` instead of the stupid launcher. However, steam does not seem to want to do this... I have tried a bunch of subtly different alternatives including the full page from `Z:` (which is where it would be in the windows prefix) but no matter what I do steam either seems to do nothing or use the launcher. What am I doing wrong?

On a related note, why does the command take the form `FULL_PATH %command%`? I would have expected it to be `%command% FULL_PATH` (i.e. so that `%command%` is some steam command and the full path is an argument). Is there a complete description anywhere of the logic for the steam launch string?
ExpandingMan 3 May 2023
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I never did figure this out, but an easy way to get around it is to create a soft-link.
Ehvis 3 May 2023
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One thing to know is that Steam will execute anything you put in the argument as long as it contains %command%. If it doesn't it'll append it as arguments to the executable. So people usually use some shell magic to get rid of the %command% stuff or use sed to replace things.
ExpandingMan 3 May 2023
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Ah... ok that kind of makes sense. So I guess it's not guaranteed to be possible to force steam to use a different `exe` with this technique. I guess the correct answer is soft links. (I vaguely remembered it having some kind of problem with soft links in the past, but this time it seemed to work without issue.)

I'm going to start using links to get rid of the launchers even when they are working. Damn launchers, seriously what the hell.
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