I've installed GOG's Alan Wake on my Steam Deck in Gaming Mode simply by executing the installer as a non-Steam game with Proton enabled. But then, the game won't launch in Gaming Mode.

The install method works fine with other games (like Painkiller Black Edition, for example). Plus, other users report having the same issue installing via Heroic Games Launcher. So I don't think it's an install problem.

You can watch the following video to see the issue : https://youtu.be/O1FDFH3ZjY4

Curiously, the Steam version of Alan Wake runs flawlessly.

What could be different with GOG's version that makes it impossible to launch on Steam Deck ?

I too am. experiencing this. I know this doesn't help OP but I wanted to raise awareness of the issue.

I have installed enty other gog games via Heroic and they work fine and yet Alan Wake does not.

OK.. I've got Alan Wake (gog ver) launching on the deck.

It would appear that the Steam version has a script that runs on 1st launch to install redistributable extensions that the game uses. The gog version doesn't seem to run these on its own.

There's prolly a couple ways to make this work but for me, I installed via Heroic Game Launcher which sets up a prefix folder for the game so you need to run the installs for DirectX and Visual C 2008 within said prefix.

To do this in HEROIC, once the game is installed, click the gear icon for Alan Wake in HGL and scroll down until you see "Run EXE on Prefix", which works by dragging an exe onto it.

Navigate to where you installed the game using the dolphin browser and you'll see a sub folder named "_redist" which contains a folder for DirectX and MSVC2008_x64.

Drag DXSETUP.exe from the DirectX folder onto the "Run EXE on Prefix" in Heroic and complete the install. Then drag vcredist_x64.exe from the MSVC2008_x64 folder and install it in the same manner.

Now the game will launch inside Heroic but simply adding Alan Wake's exe to steam won't be enough to run it in steam because that method creates a brand new prefix for the game.

BoilR seems to not work as a method for adding AW to Steam because it appears to make a new prefix as well.

What worked for me was HeroicBashLauncher.

HBL creates a script to launch the game using the prefix created by Heroic Game Launcher (which we installed DirectX and VisualC2008 into.

I didn't care for the artwork HBL used but that is easily corrected either manually via Steam Desktop or by using steamgriddb.com and SGDBoop.

Amazing find ! Congrats on figuring it out. But then how is it that GOG's Alan Wake manages to launch on Windows ? Could you elaborate a bit on this matter ? Maybe I don't really understand what a prefix is. I thought it was a folder, but obviously adding Alan Wake's EXE as a non Steam game surely doesn't change its location on the storage... So I can't see what exactly is that prefix you mention that is created anew for the game ? And how does it make the redistributable extensions unreachable ?

It's a pity the gog version doesn't launch out of the box but the Steam one does. Guess I'll stick to steam as much as possible then.

Mine launches First time after installing but refuses after that.

How did you install it? Did you run the offline installer or did you just copy your files over?


Reason behind the question: If you install a game via Steam, then Steam runs a script for the needed runtime components, Galaxy and the GOG offline installers should do the same.
But if you just copy files, then of course runtimes won't be installed. If the GOG installer does not install needed runtime components, you can report it as a bug.

Sorry, I'm kind of a lurker and don't check replies often. I'm by no means an expert on Linux, the Deck or even Windows.. thsi is just my coarse understanding of how it works.

A prefix is a directory structure containing a sort of pseudo windows environment that is created for each Windows game that you are running through proton. The prefix contains a lot of the dlls windows needs to run (or versions of them anyway.. the proton versions of these files translate api calls in windows to their linux equivalents, in so far as i understand). Also Valve has tried to include as many "redistributables" as possible to provide the environment needed for games to run. For example, directX (various versions) and certain video codecs and the like.

Bu some, due to licensing, are not able to be distributed by Valve themselves and occasionally, will need to be manually run by the end user.

Prefixes mostly are a huge collection of symbolic links so that the entirety of Windows is not being installed over and over again taking up huge amounts of space. Changing proton versions just changes all of the links to the versions of the files matching which version of proton you are using. Each version of proton itself has the actual files that are being linked to. Files not present in the base proton package that the game installs are written directly into the prefix... save files, other redistributables needed that are installed with the game... etc.

When launching a non steam windows game, if you don't specify a prefix folder specifically for the non-steam windows game you are running, then Steam will create a new prefix folder automatically but it may not have everything that it needs to run properly. Heroic Launcher creates the specific prefixes relevant to the game you are installing.

Either launching through Heroic Games Launcher itself or using the HeroicBashLauncher script to add to steam seems to create/use a launch script which specifies the correct prefix located by default in /home/deck/games/heroic

https://github.com/redromnon/HeroicBashLauncher

If you use BOILR on the other hand, as far as I can tell.. just adds the game's executable to steam without a launch script that tells steam where the prefix generated by heroic games launcher is and lets steam create a new generic steam prefix in steam's folder under steamapps. Steam then assigns a random number string as the prefix folder name, making it hard to identify unless using a tool like protontricks. Unless I've misunderstood what BOILR is doing, I would recommend HeroicBashLauncher over BOILR.

edited: for clarity.

Thanks for the explanations.

I was able to do your solution and it's working great.

Though I found that if I run the GOG Alan Wake installer through Steam as a non Steam game, the folder _redist doesn't seem to be created, which is even worse ! But this folder is indeed created when using Heroic to install the game. Very strange.

I guess I'll just use Heroic from now on. Though there is a bug, soon to be fixed, that makes the Heroic game not lauchable via Steam (unknown argument : skip version check). See https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/2144

I've just found that this issue is documented here : https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/1381

It appears wether we install via Heroic or running the GOG installer as a non-Steam game, some dependencies are not installed automatically (as opposed to installing directly through Steam).

I do wonder though how it is that the GOG installer intall dependencies on Windows and doesn't if ran on Steam Deck as a non-Steam game. It's the same executable.

Any solution? Crashes after the Remedy logo. I'm using lutris.

Any help is appreciated. I'm at my wit's end.

Get the EGS install script from the lutris website: https://lutris.net/games/alan-wake/

I know, you want to install the GOG version, but this script will set up the prefix and some dependencies only. Install it with the + button in the top on Lutris, select install from script.

After the installation is done, get the offline installer files from GOG and copy them to your drive_c folder in the prefix.

Then go to Lutris, click the up arrow next to the wine icon in the launch bar and select "Run EXE inside Wine prefix". Point to the offline installers and install them.

After the installation, go to the game configuration and point to the correct exe and remove whatever is in the Argument field.

That is working for me, using lutris-GE-proton8-22.

Didn't work for me - I couldn't figure out which dx to install from that folder, none that I tried worked for me.

What I did to make it work is to install Vulcan based direct x 1.4.1 from the winetricks (the button to the left from run exe on prefix). I remember using it for some other games and it seems to also work here (together with that other file you mentioned from redist)

What a champ it still works!!!