Steam games will suddenly not launch

General system Newbie
1

Hello kind people,

Firstly, I am very sorry if this ends up being a n00bshow and an unnecessary post. I solemnly swear I searched beforehand (for hours) with no luck. If it turns out to be a n00bshow, I hope to learn how I managed to mess up stuff. Sorry for a long post in advance, but I guess I need to clarify the issue and what I did.

Configuration/setup

I am not sure how much information you would like (please let me know), but here is some configuration:
> inxi -Fxxc0z | eos-sendlog

Also, despite my setup still is showing remnants of Windows (boo), everything has been working FINE until now. Few pointers:

  • Most games are still on a NTFS drive
  • One game is installed on my ext4 SSD with EOS-installation
  • I have installed Steam through yay from multilib repository.

Issue

Per title, suddenly Steam games will not launch. As stated, everything has been running great for months (if not a year, almost), but now I cannot even open Steam games. It seems to be every Steam game, both native Linux supported and games running through Proton. When I click the play button, Steam will show “launching”, the button will briefly show “stop” with no windows or what so ever popping up and then imedeately goes back to “play”. Thus no launch/instant crash.

Surely, I did something wrong, but for crying out loud I do not know what. I do know I very recently learned that I had a huge yay cache, so I did clear cache with yay -Scc (IIRC). Also, I have added an old second-hand HDD to my computer and I suspect something is up with this - although I have no understanding of why.

Debugging

I struggle a lot with debugging issues like this, so I would love some tips regarding this.

I do know I can make Proton logs, but - behold - that is also not working. Bothers me greatly. With multiple (Proton) games I have added the PROTON_LOG=1 %command% launch option, but no logs are made. I was able to previously.

I (learned after hours lol) tried running Steam from the terminal which give these errors while trying to start any game, this example being Rocket League (which I had installed on local ext4 drive):

pressure-vessel-wrap[13209]: E: openat(/home/USER/Data/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/sniper_platform_3.0.20250826.159138/files/.ref): Read-only file system
chdir "/home/USER/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/rocketleague/Binaries/Win64"
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/USER/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/USER/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/USER/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/USER/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
Game Recording - would start recording game 252950, but recording for this game is disabled
Adding process 13232 for gameID 252950
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/USER/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
pressure-vessel-wrap[13233]: E: openat(/home/USER/Data/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/sniper_platform_3.0.20250826.159138/files/.ref): Read-only file system
Adding process 13233 for gameID 252950
Adding process 13234 for gameID 252950
Game Recording - game stopped [gameid=252950]
Removing process 13234 for gameID 252950
Removing process 13233 for gameID 252950
Removing process 13232 for gameID 252950

Trying with a Linux native game such as Stardew Valley yields the same results. So it seems all of a sudden Steam (or a part of it?) has no write-permissions - how and why?! Perhaps that also explains why PROTON_LOG=1 produce no logs?

Things I tried (some before realising running Steam from CLI produce logs..)

I did not change fstab and am for now unwilling to mess with it since I have learned the hard way it quickly can go wrong.
I did not change any user permissions.

Help, please

For now I suspect something to do with permissions, but I am unsure how and what to exactly change - because I would argue permissions were never changed in the first place. I bet it is something stupid and simple. Unfortunately, I do not quite know how to proceed from here. Also, I never fully understood how permission works. Sorry!

tl;dr: Steam will not launch any game, it used to work JUST FINE, now it does not.
I do not know why, but I suspect permission-stuff (after adding HDD??!!) which I do not know how might have changed.

Thank you SO MUCH in advance for any help.

2

One error seems to to be tied to something called gameoverlayrenderer.

Have you tried deactivating Steam’s overlay?

3

Thanks for a quick reply!

Yes, I did (and forgot to mentioned I did so, my bad). It is currently off.

How could that suddenly be an issue, though? If it had not been before?

4

Nevermind: (9.2 Wrong ELF class)

It’s normal, not an issue.

I thought as much, but have no idea where the real problem is. (That said deactivating overlays is always a good idea when troubleshooting, on general grounds).

My next suspect would be NTFS — I never got games working from NTFS properly, but no idea what specific issue might suddenly arise. Sorry. (edit: and I see you tried games on ext4 too).

5

No need for apologies, and yes - I will definitely migrate away from NTFS. But as you probably read, it used to work JUST fine. (Although it took a good deal of tinkering to get working initially!)

Thank you for responding!

1 Like
6

Apologise for bumping, but 1) perhaps I got few more clues and 2) I would LOVE if anyone might have suggestions for fixing.

1)
It seems I cannot even delete files from my two NTFS drives despite acting as administrator. Even if using terminal with for instance rm statistics.xml I get rm: cannot remove 'statistics.xml': Read-only file system. I somehow expect it is the same reason I cannot run Steam games, although I DO NOT UNDERSTAND why a game installed on a ext4 drive will not launch.

This brings to memory that when I first connected the old HDD I think my PC tried to boot Windows from it. In any case, after adding it suddenly it took forever to boot (with a black screen), and eventuelly I cut the power, went to BIOS and edited boot priority. Since then I haven’t been able to run Steam game as mentioned.

I found this and this regarding read-only NTFS drives that suggested to fully boot Windows and fully shut it down. I did, and to my horror I no longer can boot EOS. I highly think Windows - some frigging how - overwrote my /efi partition despite EOS being on a completely different hard drive? How can that happen?

In UEFI/BIOS, my EOS-SSD is no longer called “Linux Boot Manager” (GRUB, right?) but Windows Boot Manager. If I boot from it it will simply not boot.

2)
I found a few threads to follow to see if I can recover it.

BUT: can someone explain what on earth happened? And do you think my theory is valid?

I genuinely thought that dual booting (which I understood was not recommended) referred to having two OS’es on same physical hard drive, thus I kept the OS separated.

Again, thanks in advance. Very much appreciated for any help.

1 Like
7

It doesn’t matter that it’s on different drives. Whichever OS is running has full hardware access.

Windows is notoriously bad at not touching other people’s stuff. It’s not unheard of for it to erase Linux’s bootloader.

If that’s all it did, arch-chroot https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot/2022/12/ followed by GRUB reinstall (or systemd-boot? EOS switched to the latter a year back or so; what you have depends on when you first installed EOS) might suffice to fix it.

Don’t hesitate to make a new post about this problem, since it’s become much more serious than Steam games not booting, and the current thread title does not convey that.

Good luck.

8

On my installation of Steam, there are two “Steam Linux Runtime” programs – version 1.0 (scout) and version 3.0 (sniper) – which are used to launch Linux native games. This is in addition to the Proton executables.

It could be that one or more of these programs are installed on your NTFS drive. This could cause any programs relying on them to crash regardless of the drive the game itself is installed on.

1 Like
9

The first thing i did when i switched to linux is to make everything for linux. NTFS is bad to use for steam games, i tried that in the past and for some reason my games never booted. I changed my nvme drive to ext4 for games and all the problems where gone.

1 Like