2K removed their launcher in 2024, making this guide obsolete. This fell under my radar as I've been busy with my job for the past year and haven't played the Bioshock games since 2023. Thank you 2K for finally realizing how much you guys ♥♥♥♥♥♥ this whole thing up and trashing the whole thing instead of doubling down on it. Anyway, now that the launcher's been removed, this guide is basically pointless. So why am I keeping this up and not just deleting it? Because I want you all to know just how stupid this whole thing was for all of us that had to suffer.

In 2022, 2K surprised everyone with a new update to Bioshock. What did they include in this update? New content? Bug fixes? Updated credits or something? Nope. They added their own crappy game launcher to the game. Why would they do this is anyone's guess.

The inclusion of a new launcher is already frustrating as is with every major game studio wanting to create their own to control how much money they make and how we use their games, but what makes this more egregious is that trying to launch this game through the Steam launcher results in an error saying that a file called LauncherPatcher.exe is missing from the installation, making the game literally unplayable.

Why is this? It's because the update, in actuality, contains NONE of the 2K launcher files. Seriously. There's a new folder in the installation path called "2KLauncher" but it's just an empty folder! How could they have screwed that up?!

As of January of 2023, 2K fixed this issue by including the patcher executable like they should have done in the first place. The method described here should still work for bypassing the launcher, but the images are slightly outdated.

Thankfully there is an easy fix for this but it's slightly less convenient than the conventional way of launching Steam games.

There are now 2 ways of fixing this, both are easy but one makes it impossible to run the game from Steam. I'll be showing both methods, but the second one is way better. (I decided to remove the old method as it sucked and didn't work on Linux).

(Seriously, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! this is how it was prior to the January 2023 update.)

The new method is to use the game's executable as the launcher patcher. It's similar to the old method of running the executable directly, but this will allow us to run the game through Steam as well. Also, we still don't need any of the official launcher files too!

You can find a game's files usually by going to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common" and finding a folder with the game's name. If you have your game installed in a different location such as on a secondary or external drive, then there's an easy way of getting to the files.

In Steam, go into your games list, right-click the game, hover over the Manage option and click Browse local files. The option should look like the image on the right.

After finding the game files, we need to get the main executable (exe) file. The file is located under Build\Final\BioshockHD.exe (right).

Copy BioshockHD.exe either by right-clicking it and clicking copy or by using Control-C. Next, go back to the main directory and go into the 2KLauncher folder.

Paste the executable here and rename it to LauncherPatcher.exe, just like in the picture, replacing the existing executable.


Congrats! You beat 2K's awful launcher! And you still have the ability to run the game through Steam!

One last note, according to someone in the comments, you will need to do this again if your game updates for whatever reason (only confirmed to have happened on Linux at the moment). Update: with the January 2023 update, you will need to do this again if you've already did it and every subsequent time they update the game or when validating the game files.

While making this guide I tried something kind of dumb. I thought that I could bypass the missing LauncherPatcher.exe problem by just putting a dummy executable in the 2KLauncher folder.

This didn't work.

It appears that the game - at least when launching from Steam's interface - expects a specific file in that location and crashes if the file isn't correct. This could probably be alleviated by just finding and using the official 2K Launcher files... but why would anyone want those on their PC?! I'd much rather use this roundabout way of launching the game than to have yet another launcher installed.

(Update: Obviously with the method in the guide, the missing executable doesn't have to be the official 2K Launcher patch thing, but seemingly has to be an executable from the game. I don't know why using the main executable works while a blank C++ template program didn't, but I don't care. I just want to kill some splicers again.)

Anyway, I hope this guide helps anyone else that's been experiencing this issue too and that 2K can get themselves together and fix this dumb issue (they did, but we still have to go through this bs).

Now that the launcher files are included, this guide is somewhat obsolete as the advance launch settings in Steam work just fine now. If you don't know what I mean, check this guide here on Steam. It's even simpler than replacing the launcher patcher executable and is also less intrusive.