Steam Deck - New EASY Way to Install ALL Your Non-Steam Launchers & Artwork

What's up, guys? Welcome back to the channel. We're about to take a look at the easiest way to install your third party launchers, like Battlenet, epic and others, to your steam deck. It's very easy now with some really cool software from GitHub that we're going to take a look at, and huge shout out to steam deck gaming- the sdd channel over on YouTube. Show more

We work together, often behind the scenes, talking about a lot of different things, and these really helped keep me in the loop with what's been happening with this software. So anyways, guys, let's go ahead and get into it. Show more

We need to do this starting from desktop mode, so let's go ahead and get switched over to there now. All right, now that you're in desktop mode, you're going to want to go ahead and use your favorite browser, whatever works for you here. You're going to want to go to the non-steam launchers on Steam deck- GitHub here. Huge shout out to them for some great work on this, as it has worked flawlessly for me for these launchers on my steam deck, so make sure you support them in any way that you can. Now I'll have the link for this in the description as well. You're going to want to click releases over there on the right and you'll see the top latest release right here. We're going to click to download the source code. Once we download that, we'll be pretty much done in here until we come back to the browser and I'll show you some stuff later for your artwork. Show more

So once I've downloaded that, I'm going to go into my Dolphin explorer files here, go into downloads and you'll see I have my non-steam launchers download right here. I'm going to right click on that and I'm going to click extract archive here. Click here. All right, once we do that, it'll very quickly make us a folder here for our non-steam launcher software. We're going to open that up and then we have our file right here that we want to run. I'm going to go ahead and double click that and execute. We're going to run this and it'll open up pretty quickly for us. Show more

Now here's our list of launchers. You have a load of them, your most popular ones up top and then towards the bottom here and you've got Rockstar, humble, Amazon, EA, Gog and all those. I'm gonna go ahead and just select the four main ones I need to grab for right now with Uplay, which is Ubisoft, EA app, origin's been discontinued- epic games and Battlenet. The other ones I'm going to uncheck for now and we'll just start with these four here now. If you look at the bottom, you'll see you have a start fresh Tab and if you wanted to delete these, the software will do that for you as well. So you can click start fresh and it would take those out. You can also move to SD card. So some other useful features that I won't necessarily show in the video but that you can get to and start fresh. For deleting those is really handy. I would recommend uninstalling any games first that you have installed and then running that though. All right, so it's going to go ahead and deal with proton for me here, because it does need to use a version of GE proton to install these, but we're not going to use that on down the road. So I'm going to fast forward here. You're going to see it installing everything automatically. It did G proton. It's doing Battlenet, epic, all of that. You'll see stuff open up. I'm fast forwarding here like 10 times just to get through this quickly, so you guys can see this happen. But this took quite a few minutes for me to actually get through. Now, once I did get to the end and everything was installed, you get your little okay question right here you're gonna have to click on now. Before I clicked it, though, EA tried to open which. We don't want that yet. We don't want to log in here yet with this. So I closed that out and then I just clicked OK and then we're good to go. This is going to go ahead and restart Steam for us, so that everything will then be applied now that steam is restarted. You can see, we now have Battlenet over here, we're gonna have our EA app over here, we're gonna have epic and, of course, we're going to have the Ubisoft Connect app. So it's automatically installed all of those for us and it's automatically added those to steam for us, which is awesome. But what I'm going to do is finish everything else here from desktop mode as well. It's just easier for me. Show more

So I'm going to go into properties, compatibility and I'm going to force experimental for all four launchers that I've installed. Experimental, I believe, has eight wrapped into it and it's the only one that works for the EA app and it works well for the others as well. So I'm going to go ahead and again do this for all four of the launchers that I have in here. I'm going to change their compatibility and force that to experimental for all of them. Now, after I go through and do that for all those, I'm also going to launch them and log into them and that type of thing. Show more

But let me go ahead and finish this up real quick. I'm going to go ahead and Skip past the rest of them, but I want you guys to see the process here. So now that I've done that, I'm going to go ahead and actually open all four of these one at a time, let them update, do whatever they need to do now that they're running the proper compatibility, and log into each one. That way, by the time I get back over to Game Mode, I've already done this harder process of going through getting logged in, getting Verification codes, all that kind of stuff, and then putting them. And I have a mouse and keyboard here, so it's easier now once I have all those ready to go. Show more

There is something else I like to do in each app as well, and that's going to the settings and make it to where it's not going to automatically try to launch when the computer starts and that if I close the app it doesn't just try to minimize somewhere, it actually closes. That's just something I like to do to each one. Usually these apps have those options in them. Usually the launchers will have those options and make sure anything for cloud saves is turned on as well, just in case. Show more

And now that I've done that to all four of my launchers- they're all on Force compatibility, experimental. I've opened each one and logged in. I've checked my settings and they're all good to go. We're almost ready to go back to Game Mode. But if you want to add custom artwork and you don't have decky loader already, I'll put a link to this as well in the description, and I have a full tutorial video or a couple of them on the channel as well. Show more

But we're going to go through this here really quickly. Also, for those of you that just want to know now how to do this, you go over to this website and just click download right here for decky loader. It's very quick and easy and we're going to go ahead and close the browser once that's done. I'm going to go ahead and close steam here, or minimize. Show more

I'm going to open up my dolphin folder again here. I'm going to go to my downloads folder and that's where ducky loader is going to be at and we're going to go ahead and open up decky loader and run it. Now I'm going to let it run into an issue here so that I can show you how to fix it. So I'm going to click execute and continue, and then it's going to ask for a password that I've not set up yet. I haven't set up my sudo or my scandex user password on the steam deck yet, so I'm going to click no. If you already have a password set up, that's where you'll be prompted to enter it. Show more

I'm going to go here to my settings and to users and you'll see here, as for our steam deck user right here, change password. I click that and it's going to let me make my password. So I'm going to go ahead and use something I use on all my steam decks so I never forget it. Click set password and we're done. Now I'm going to go back in and run decky loader installer again, and this time it'll just ask for that password. Show more

Now we'll be good to go. We'll go ahead and stick the password in here, click OK. Deculators gonna ask you for release or pre-release. Just click release, click OK, and it's a very quick process for it to install and then you'll be able to tweak everything from game mode. Alright, so that install is finished up, we'll click ok, we'll close out of this and now all of our desktop mode stuff is done. Everything else we want to do can be done from game mode. So that's what we're going to do. Now we're going to go ahead and get switched back over to Game Mode, where we can finish up and make things look nice over there with our artwork and make sure everything's running just fine. So now that we're back in game mode, you can see here there's all four launchers we installed. Show more

Of course they don't have any artwork or anything like that yet, but they are four non-steam games here that'll show up and ready to run. Now you could, of course, use them like this and you don't have to have decky loader, but I like ducky loader for a lot of different things. We're going to concentrate more specifically here on just the, the, the grid for the artwork. But in decky loader there's a lot of different plugins that you can grab that make your deck experience a lot better, and I have other videos on that on the channel. But let's concentrate on going in here to the store and going all the way down to steam grid DB. This is what allows us to change artwork for all of our shortcuts and games. So we'll install that really quickly. It doesn't take very long and there aren't really any options you need to worry about here. There's a little tutorial. You can look at some tab settings and stuff like that. But now that we have that installed, I can go over to these non-steam games and hit the start button and you'll see: change artwork. Show more

Now you're going to be able to go in and easily change the artwork for these. Pick your capsule, pick your wide capsule, your hero, your logo and your icon. You'll be able to manage all these at any time. Change them at any time. When you do your icon, you'll be prompted to restart your steam deck. Now I'm not going to do that right away because I'm going to go ahead and do all four launchers and then I'm gonna restart one time and have them all applied. So I'll go through here and finish up Battlenet. You can see, just go through each one, pick whichever one you like, whatever looks nice that you want to go with. Now there's that restart problem. I'm going to click later, go finish my other three and then we'll do a restart. All right, now that we've done that. Show more

I've restarted. All four have their artwork that I've chosen in here and are good to go. I've had them all logged in, of course, from desktop mode. I know they work. You can see in properties. Now we have our little icons and it's nice and neat and tidy. So we've got all of our launchers. This is a super easy way to get set up, get them installed and get your artwork in. Now I'm going to open up Battlenet really quickly here. I do want to talk about the controller setup just a little bit as well. But going into to Battlenet, I'm going to go ahead and check out the server slam. So I'm going to install Diablo again here. It's been running really well on the deck so I think I'll take a look at it again. But no problems here installing. I'm doing everything on the SSD. There are other ways to get around and do things on the SD cards as well, but for me on this everything's just running off of the internal one gig SSD I have. So that's installing there and everything is going to be good to go. But I want to jump over to the EA app real quick here, because this one I didn't have control set up for. Show more

So I only have touch screen. I can't use my trackpad, I can't click anything and I can't browse through anything. So I'm going over to controller settings. You'll see Gamepad with joystick trackpad. I'm going to go in here and change that over to Gamepad with mouse trackpad. That'll allow me to move the mouse around with my right track pad. Once I do that, I'm then going to go over into edit layout and then I'm going to go down to track pads, because now I want to change my right trackpad to be a left Mouse click so that I can scroll around with my thumb on the right track pad and click once to select things. It makes it really easy when I'm navigating these launchers. So you can see there that's been chosen. Now I can use my trackpad, I can move my mouse around and I can just click it and it'll be like a left Mouse click, easy to navigate. You'll probably need to do this for all the launchers you install, but if you run into any trouble, usually you can go in there and just tweak those settings so that you can browse around and then your controller will work as normal in game. But that's pretty much it, guys. Show more

A super easy way now with that software to install all of your launchers and with decky loader, get all your artwork set up and just kind of manage things a little bit easier. Alright, guys, thanks a lot for coming to check out the video. As always, I really appreciate it and I'll see you guys in the next one. Show more