Tips and Tricks

Launchpad Tips and Tricks

Game Launching

Preventing Launchpad from attaching to an external launcher

Often, when running a Non-Steam game, the shortcut runs an external launcher which then starts the game. While this usually works, it causes Steam to attach itself to that launcher, meaning the Steam Overlay often shows up in the launcher client, and Steam thinks you are playing until you actually close the launcher, not the game.

The brute force method is to tell Launchpad to close the launcher both before and after launching the game. This will allow Steam to attach to the launcher without most of the associated issues. However, this is a clunky and slow method of launching a game.

Launchpad also has a Run Method named "Scheduled", and it is designed specifically to work around this problem more intelligently. When running commands via the "Scheduled" method, Steam or other platforms will ignore the launched application--no overlay will be attached to the launcher!

While fixing one issue, this causes another--since Steam didn't attach itself to the launcher, and the launcher is usually what starts the game, Steam also won't attach itself to the game. Read on to learn a solution!

Attaching the Steam overlay to another platform's game

When using the Scheduled method to run a game, or in certain other circumstances, Steam won't be aware of the game when it launches. While the reasons for this are usually desired, the end result is that you have no Steam overlay.

To work around this issue, you can use the "Replace Process" option on the game. This tells Launchpad that, as soon as it detects that the game's process has started, it should kill and re-launch the process with the same start options.

For most games, the end result is a flawless launch that allows the Steam overlay to attach to the game itself without attaching to the launcher. For some games, however, you might find that this method causes the game to fail to launch entirely. In these cases, you will need to configure Launchpad to use a method that doesn't rely on this option.