If you’ve been playing games on PC, you’re more than likely cultivating most of your digital library through Steam. Valve’s storefront has been the de facto place to purchase and play PC games for decades, even as publishers like Microsoft, Epic, Blizzard, and more are attempting to lure players away with their own storefronts. Some offer great incentives to do so. Microsoft offers its Game Pass titles exclusively through the Xbox App on Windows, while Epic gives away games weekly that you can only redeem through its own launcher.
This segmentation can make it unnecessarily complicated to keep all of your games in one place or, at the very least, available through a single launcher for easy living-room play. It’s also problematic with controllers, especially if you’re accustomed to heavily customizing your controller input schemes with Steam Input.
This input layer only functions through Steam, and is part of the reason why Valve’s new Steam Controller doesn’t work outside of the platform. So if you’re looking to unify where all your games launch from and benefit from all the work Valve has put into Steam, here’s how to get everything working through Steam regardless of where you purchased your games.
The Epic Games Store, Battle.Net, and traditional executables
If you’re looking at games you own across Battle.Net, The Epic Games Store, GOG, Ubisoft Connect, and more, there’s one thing they all have in common: They’re all standard Windows executables, or files you’ll recognize with the .exe extension. By default, adding a game to Steam requires it to be in this format, which makes it easy to link it to Valve’s launcher. Simply open Steam, navigate to the Games tab in the settings bar at the top, and click Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library. You’ll then be able to browse all folders across your PC for these executables, which can vary depending on how you’ve configured all your different launchers and where they install their respective titles. If you haven’t edited those locations, you can find them in their default directories listed below.
Epic Games Store: C:Program FilesEpic Games
Ubisoft Connect: C:Program Files (x86)UbisoftUbisoft Game Launchergames
GOG Galaxy: C:Program Files (x86)GOG GalaxyGames
Battle.Net: C:Program Files (x86)
Once added, you’ll find all the games you’ve added in your Steam Library. Launching them from here still forces you to go through the launcher they belong to (Ubisoft Connect will still open and launch its game through there, for example), but it now does so in a wrapper that features Steam Input and the Steam Overlay. This lets you utilize both in games that you haven’t purchased through Steam itself, albeit with some rare exceptions. This is the easiest way to get the Steam Controller working with games outside your Steam Library, requiring just a few clicks to get things going.
Xbox Games Pass And UWP Apps
If you’re a subscriber to Xbox Games Pass, or purchase games through the Xbox app on PC, then getting those titles to show up in Steam is a little more complicated. These are not standard executables but rather Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications, which Steam doesn’t natively recognize. This means you cannot add UWP games to Steam through the same method as most other launchers, but the good news is that it is possible. It involves creating a link between the UWP game in question and Steam in a format that Valve’s software understands, which is where UWPhook comes in handy.
This free, open-sourced, and community-driven tool has been around for some time, and allows you to scan your PC for all UWP games and applications and create links for them in Steam. Once downloaded, you can select which games you want added to Steam (as well as rename them), after which they should appear in your library as you expect. This allows you to launch them through Steam itself and play within a wrapper that includes Steam Input, enabling support for the Steam Controller and your customized controller profiles, among other things. It also allows you to launch these games through Steam Big Picture mode, if that’s your environment of choice for a living room PC setup.
UWPhook’s website notes that while most games should function without issue, there are cases where Steam Input might not work with a UWP game. You’ll have to test all your favorites to make sure, but broadly speaking, this has been a tried-and-tested solution for UWP support on Steam for a few years now and is the de facto method of doing so.
Whether you just want to get your latest Steam Controller working with all your PC games, or you want everything in your digital library integrated into one launcher, it doesn’t take much effort anymore to get everything working through Steam.
