Launchers have been the bane of videogames since the beginning of time. This guide aims to skip them on launch or close them post-game. Once you know how to do it, it's very easy to replicate to any game.

The guide will also be helpful in the case you need to run programs before the game is launched, perhaps to delete or move some files, or activate a software.

The core of this guide, for this we'll need to gather some info about your game. I'm going to use an imaginary game called Duty of War which is located in the "Duty of War" folder inside Steam's common folder and its executable is "DutyWar.exe". Steam is installed in the disk partition "F". You need to replace these with your chosen game.


First, we need to find a game's entire path and executable.

• 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

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 copied path is F:\Steam\steamapps\common\Duty of War.

In Windows 11, you can just right click the executable and select "Copy as Path".

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

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

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

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.

This part of the guide is intended for advanced Steam users familiar with command-line parameters, so I'm going to go straight to the point without hand-holding.

For our pre-launch parameters, we're going to see a method to launch our game plus any other software or scripts you need on launch.


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

Inside the .bat file, add:


Optionally, add more programs or parameters:


Now add the batch 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 might need.

This part of the guide is intended for advanced Steam users familiar with command-line parameters, so I'm going to go straight to the point without hand-holding.

There are a couple ways to do this, apparently. You can use a batch file, or (in theory) you can use a semicolon, but I haven't been able to make it work this way.

What you want is to replace C:\Path\To\Your\Program.exe for what you need.

I don't really know the particulars of scripting, so no idea if there's a more direct way to use this one.