Lutris, Launchers, and Different Game settings or installs

General Discussion
1

Hey everybody, I’m fairly new to using Lutris. So far, not bad.

I’m looking at how to correctly handle games that share a launcher. Origin, Blizzard, and GOG are examples that come to mind.

So let’s take one of those: The Blizzard Launcher. I can get it to install and play a game (Let’s say Starcraft 2) but later want to install a different game (let’s say Overwatch).

So the question is: What is the correct way to handle multiple games that handle the same launcher?

It would make sense for Lutris to use the exact same files for the launcher, and different configurations based on the game you want to play. Having this shared launcher data would mean the launcher would only need to be authorized once, vs multiple authorizations that are possible if each game install also includes it’s own launcher install. But how do you do this?

Now, in the case of Starcraft 2 and Overwatch, they just happen to work with the same settings, so I can use my Lutris link for one of the games to play either of them… but the best experience would be if I could launch either game directly from it’s own link within Lutris, using the shared launcher/files and it’s own specific Lutris game settings. Is this possible?

The other option altogether is to have each game have it’s own copy of the launcher. The only disadvantages to this method that I can think of is a) an increase in file storage for multiple copies of the same launcher files and/or b) the aforementioned issues with each launcher needing it’s own re-authorization.

If there are workarounds, That’s okay and I’m curious what they are. Thanks for marking an amazing product.

2

One possible workaround would be installing games by hand from the launcher and then adding them into Lutris with shared Wine prefix & similar config.
If you want separate Wine prefixes but same launcher you’ll probably have to set it up in an external folder (like a D: drive or something), which basically means you need to do it from scratch (and that’s assuming it won’t refuse to run after being “copied to a different PC”)

3

Install all games separately because they need different settings. Keep the launcher separate. You will quite often reinstall the launcher because Blizzard makes another ugly change. But you want to keep the games. I copied the game folder into a separate location and added that location to the launcher. This way I can ditch and reinstall the launcher whenever necessary.

Actually, when I say launcher I mean the Battle net app.