Launchers have been the bane of videogames since the beginning of time. This guide aims to skip them, if possible.

Once you know how to do it, it's very easy to replicate.

Also, this guide covers a way to launch several programs at game launch, thankfully it's also easy.

The core of this guide, for this we'll need to gather simple info about your game.

For this example I'm going to use an imaginary game called Duty of War which is located in the "Duty of War" folder inside Steam and its executable is "DutyWar.exe". Steam is installed in the disk partition "F".


First, we need to find a game's entire path and executable. AFAIK there's no way to easily skip this step in a more generic way, the other way is with the Advanced section of the guide. To find it:

• Enter the Steam Library game's page
  
• Click on the cog at top right, hover over Manage and select Browse local files
  
• A File Explorer will open, now locate the game's main executable and take note of the exact name, in this imaginary case it's DutyWar.exe

Note: in some games (specially in Unreal Engine games) the main executable is located inside several subfolders, for example ".\game\bin64\Executable.exe"

Now to find the path, in Windows 10/11 it's easy, all you need to do is click on the address bar in File Explorer and Windows will highlight the entire path, now Copy it with via Right Click > Copy or Ctrl+C.

For this imaginary case, the path will be F:\Steam\steamapps\common\Duty of War.


Finally, the last steps:

• Back on the Steam Library game's page, click on the cog and go to Properties...
  
• In LAUNCH OPTIONS, Paste the previously copied path and then add the previously noted executable (DutyWar.exe) like it's shown below:

• And lastly, we add the magic parameter %command% after that, so the finished parameter reads like this

Now close the dialog and launch the game via the Play button. VICTORY!! NO MORE LAUNCHERS!!

Note: It's extremely important to correctly add the quotation marks at the beginning and end of the path+executable, without it, Steam won't be able to find the game.

I will rewrite this section, so I'll write it barebones for now

Create a .bat file on the game's root folder. Let's call launch.bat.

Inside the .bat file, add


Optionally, add more stuff


Now add the .bat file to the game's launch options.


And that's it! This another way to skip the launcher, and also launch other things that you need.