I don’t even know if this is allowed here but frankly, I don’t care. I have seen conflicting guides on how to play cracked games. Some say to use lutris/wine, some say to use proton with steam and add the cracked games to steam though that carries a significant risk of a ban. So to all Linux pirates, how do you do this?

  • propitiouspanda@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Install in a Windows VM then move the files over to your Linux side.

    It’s a real PITA and you can expect to require at least 3x the storage during the process.

  • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    26·
    1 day ago

    proton with steam and add the cracked games to steam though that carries a significant risk of a ban

    Never heard that, and can testify that’s absolute nonsense.

    • highball@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      20 hours ago

      Yep, they aren’t trying to figure out what games, one manually adds to the Steam library.

  • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    6·
    23 hours ago

    For anything outside of steam,epic etc you can use Heroic Games launcher (i personally use it for Epic Games,itch.io and games outside of Steam)
    Ik it’s a Epic Games,GOG and Amazon Games launcher but it works for Games outside of any store

  • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    231·
    1 day ago

    I’m going to assume you’re using official, paid-for GOG offline installers. Other installers will work the same way.

    I have a directory for non-Steam games mounted at /games. Every game has its own directory, and a game and prefix directory for the game content and the wineprefix respectively. For example, for Cyberpunk 2077 you would run mkdir -p /games/cyberpunk-2077/{game,prefix} to create the directory tree all at once.

    To install the game, I simply use wine to execute the installer with the prefix directory set as the wineprefix: WINEPREFIX=/games/cyberpunk-2077/prefix wine SETUP_FILE_NAME.exe. The root filesystem will be mounted as the Z: drive – use Z:\games\cyberpunk-2077\game as the install path.

    I use Lutris to launch the game. Add a new game, choose “Locally installed game”, then set the executable path to the game’s main executable, the working directory to the game directory (usually works, some games expect a different working directory), and the prefix to the prefix directory.

    • darkguyman@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I have two questions: First, can I skip the first step if the game is preinstalled? Second, how do you determine compatibilty? I don’t want to spent days downloading/torrenting a game only for it to be completely incompatiable.

      • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        If the game comes in an archive (like portable Windows applications), you can simply copy the files to a directory and point Lutris at the executable.

        Compatibility has been pretty solid for me. There are only a few games that didn’t work out of the box (excepting those that are intentionally broken through anti-cheat). You can often get away with running games on Wine, but for most games you’ll want Proton. Lutris will detect and use Proton versions that are installed by Steam, copied manually into compatibilitytools.d, or it can download Wine and Proton releases on its own. There’s also GloriousEggroll’s fork with many game-specific fixes.

        ProtonDB and Lutris.net are the most useful resources, you can check if the anti-cheat solution might be an issue on Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?, Steam forum is a thing that exists, and you can ask in this community.

        • darkguyman@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          1·
          11 hours ago

          Thanks, I didn’t know that Lutris used proton when necessary. I don’t need steam to run lutris’s versions of proton, right?

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    Bottles is the way. You can set up bottles (Wine prefixes, or environments) with predefined libraries and Proton for games. You simply run the installer through the GUI or add a shortcut to the executable.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    I run Windows software such as games with Proton, I used Wine before. The frontend to launch it doesn’t matter a lot to me. Lutris, Bottles, Steam… they mostly all work. But honestly, I don’t pirate many games these days. I’m more for older games and since we got Steam sales and Humble Bundles, I get a lot of them there. At least the Windows games. I haven’t found a legal source for old console games, but we have a lot of emulators for N64, PSP, Arcade machines … as well. And great frontends like Emulationstation.

  • ogeist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    There are many ways to do it, I have never used Steam like that but never heard of a ban due to cracked games. My preferred way would be using Lutris, but I have not used it in a while.

    The general concept is:

    1. Create a container/app in Lutris, selecting your Wine preferred version.
    2. Open the container (so that it creates the directory files)
    3. Copy the contents of the game into the container
    4. Point the Lutris container to the exe and done.
    5. Run game

    These steps are not precise but the general overview. You can even switch Wine versions if needed without the need to reinstall.