IT's so crazy to run into a comment that speaks about this. I recently got the urge to play Mass Effect, and wanted to replay through the series. I have had the game bought when it went on sale. I download all 100+gb of the game, and launch it to see some performance. EA app required. I might just request a refund, and then pirate the game, to be real with you all.
The launchers are pretty lightweight and don't consume much. It is just annoying to buy the game on one store, it launches another store, only to launch a game launcher, then you can pick r̶̶e̶̶d̶̶,̶̶ ̶̶g̶̶r̶̶e̶̶e̶̶n̶̶̶,̶̶ ̶̶o̶̶r̶̶ ̶̶b̶̶l̶̶u̶̶e̶ I mean ME 1 2 or 3
Did that too a while back, but anecdotally it feels lees buggy through Steam, especially regarding updates.
Also clicking the Stop button in Steam doesn't leave behind zombie processes off Battle.net.exe and Agent.exe, which I had to manually kill when using Lutris. Assume that's due to Protons(?) pressure-vessel thingy.
The only thing that got me to quit WoW and finally Uninstall battle.net was not will power but the shitty people in the organization that ran it. Got lucky I guess otherwise I would be healing unapprecitative jerks the rest of my life.
The WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1 %command% is the Steam launch option you set, with %command% meaning roughly "what Steam would do without any launch options set".
The whole process was a bit finicky and I did it a few month ago, but from what I remember it went something like this:
It is used in the Launch Options of a Steam game. %command% just gets replaced by whatever Steam would use to launch the game. It's useful to set up anything before the game actually launches, such as setting environment variables or run scripts.
I don't know why people go through all this trouble just to give money to publishers that don't give a shit about you. There's nothing on Blizzard worth buying anymore. Don't bother. Blizzard is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
I'm involved in the development of an addon for the Classic WoW versions (Questie), and the thing I do there is such a convoluted process that not doing it feels like letting my fellow devs and the users down. But you can do development on the PTRs and beta servers, so I haven't given money to Blizzard in a long time. Now you could argue that this is even worse in regards to supporting Blizzard than just paying for a game, but I rationalise it to myself with the fact that the newer clients will inevitably be used for private servers just like the old ones were (some already are actually).
I struggle with it, but still manage to find fun in what blizzard made. I understand that blizz is not what blizz was. I gave up hearthstone. But still enjoy d2 and d3 and I'm hoping the changes they made to d4 will be good. I played wow 20 years ago, coming back now feels like a new game and it does manage to spark nostalgia in me. I hear what you are saying, but I'm not quite done with blizz yet.... Looking at you POE2.
Installing battle.net in steam is really easy. Just add non-steam game in steam and choose the battle.net installer, then right click on it in steam and click properties, then compatibility, and choose Force the user of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool and choose Proton Experimental. Then just run it and install it like normal. Once it's finished you just repeat the process for the actual installed battle.net program or whatever blizzard game you want. With this, you don't have to mess with running custom commands. The blizzard launcher will be located somewhere like "/home/me/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2806461641/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/StarCraft II/StarCraft II.exe" where the big number after compatdata is something else. You can run the command
find ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata -iname '*battle*.exe to help find it. Also you can tell Steam to always use proton experimental if you want, it's been good to me. Good luck!
I have a steam deck and getting assassin's creed... dunno, brotherhood? to run was so annoying, I thought about just letting it be. I'll stay away from their games now.
I haven't played anything blizzard in a minute but I absolutely LOVE the ubi launcher that asks for admin permissions two to eight times then makes me look up my password each time I launch one of their games (not that often) despite checking Remember Me EVERY TIME
Valve is great in terms of Linux support and it's development, but to be honest I hate Steam launcher too. I do not use the store frontend, friendlist, notifications and other things on top, all I want is to download game binaries and updates.
You can still make shortcuts to your steam games to launch them outside of steam. However I have noticed that the Blizzard launcher doesn't seem to fully quit after quitting the system tray icon, I have to click stop game in steam. I guess I still prefer this to having unused wine/proton process running in the background.