I’ve got a substantial library of games on GOG and Epic that I wanted to play on the Steam Deck, and I’ve used the Heroic Launcher with some success to access a lot of my libraries on those two platforms, but managing the compatibility per game is a bit frustrating and sometimes after an update things break.
Can anyone else share any success or failure stories here? The only other place I’ve seen this discussion was on Steam itself and I wanted a non-steam take on the practice of running non-steam platform games and what works.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it.
BUT: I’m both a Deck user and Linux desktop gamer. I believe you should be able to install Epic and GOG both (the launchers) as non-Steam apps, and then they each get installed to fresh Proton prefixes in Steam. No additional tools should be needed besides Steam itself.
I think you can still select a default install location for their games too, since you do get Linux file system access from the prefix (it’s mounted as drive Z).
I’d probably run them both using Proton Experimental, since it tends to be better with other launchers. Or, a later version of Glorious Eggroll. The cases where something doesn’t run on GE or Experimental (but does work with some other Proton version) should be extremely minimal, so using one of those for the whole shebang should give good results. You can freely change the Proton version for the whole launcher if something gives you trouble.
Yes there are other solutions (Heroic, Lutris), but ultimately this should work as well with fewer components. I use this approach for Ubi games that use their daft launcher.