Disabling Steam's overlay for certain non-Steam games?

[Sabishi1985]

So I've added a couple of non-Steam games to my library and I would like to turn off Steam's overlay for those games only.

This was possible a while ago by entering big picture mode and unticking a well hidden box inside of the controller settings menu.

But now I can't seem to find a way to disable the steam overlay for certain non-Steam games only. Did they seriously got rid of this feature? Is there another way of doing this? 🙁

[AustrAlien2010]

Unfortunately, Steam removed that functionality with an earlier update.
And this is not a perfect solution, but it will have to do:

Go to Steam: View: Settings: In-Game: uncheck "Enable the Steam overlay while in-game".
Press OK.
Then you can turn the overlay off. (The overlay will be disabled for everything else too, but at least is a workaround.)



Some additional information that could be relevant:

If you go to
:\Steam\userdata\#\config

and open a file called 'shortcuts.vdf' with a text editor, then you can see that "AllowOverlay" is saved there, and is part of this file's contents.
The file 'localconfig.vdf', where it stores these settings for regular Steam games, is also located there. But that file refers to this setting as "EnableGameOverlay" "1".

I suppose that's where to look for these settings. But I just can't seem to modify the 'shortcuts.vdf' file effectively. (A Steam restart is required to reload the file into the client, in case you do modify this file.)

(In case you decide to experiment with this, be sure to make a copy of any files before modifying them, or else you might lose data.)

[Sabishi1985]

Originally posted by AustrAlien2010:

Unfortunately, Steam removed that functionality with an earlier update.
And this is not a perfect solution, but it will have to do:

Go to Steam: View: Settings: In-Game: uncheck "Enable the Steam overlay while in-game".
Press OK.
Then you can turn the overlay off. (The overlay will be disabled for everything else too, but at least is a workaround.)



Some additional information that could be relevant:

If you go to
:\Steam\userdata\#\config

and open a file called 'shortcuts.vdf' with a text editor, then you can see that "AllowOverlay" is saved there, and is part of this file's contents.
The file 'localconfig.vdf', where it stores these settings for regular Steam games, is also located there. But that file refers to this setting as "EnableGameOverlay" "1".

I suppose that's where to look for these settings. But I just can't seem to modify the 'shortcuts.vdf' file effectively. (A Steam restart is required to reload the file into the client, in case you do modify this file.)

(In case you decide to experiment with this, be sure to make a copy of any files before modifying them, or else you might lose data.)

Thanks a lot, I'll give it a go. :)

I've disabled the overlay for a non-steam game a while ago and now I can't turn it back on. Thanks Steam. :,D (I've solved this by adding the game to my library a second time. Now I have two versions of the game in my library: One uses the overlay and one doesn't...) 😅

[AustrAlien2010]

I have found a better solution that will actually accomplish what you want, but is a lot of work to do:

• Create a shortcut to Steam on your desktop.
  
• Add -oldbigpicture as a launch parameter to your Steam shortcut, to enable the previous version of Big Picture mode.
  (To add a launch parameter, right-click your Steam shortcut: click Properties: go to the Shortcut tab, and type -oldbigpicture after the text in the field that reads Target.)
  
• Click OK.
  
• Exit Steam and restart it by using the created shortcut.
  
• After restarting, open the earlier version of Big Picture mode. In the earlier version you can enable or disable the overlay settings for non-Steam games individually under controller options.

Doing this should achieve the wanted end result.

(Afterwards, you can remove -oldbigpicture from the shortcut, and still have the overlay disabled for the titles that you disabled it for.)


But the problem is that Valve may eventually remove the old Big Picture mode at some point in time, and then there is no way for you to perform this workaround anymore.

[Sabishi1985]

Originally posted by AustrAlien2010:

I have found a better solution that will actually accomplish what you want, but is a lot of work to do:

• Add -oldbigpicture as a launch parameter to your Steam shortcut, to enable the previous version of Big Picture mode.
  (To add a launch parameter, right-click your Steam shortcut: click Properties: go to the Shortcut tab, and type -oldbigpicture after the text in the field that reads Target.)
  
• Restart Steam.
  
• After restarting, open the earlier version of Big Picture mode. In the earlier version you can enable or disable the overlay settings for non-Steam games individually under controller options.

Doing this should achieve the wanted end result.

(Afterwards, you can remove -oldbigpicture from the shortcut, and still have the overlay disabled for the titles that you disabled it for.)


But the problem is that Steam will eventually remove the old Big Picture mode at some point in time, and then there is no way for you to perform this workaround anymore.

Thanks again! :)

I love Steam, it's the best launcher out there. But boy oh boy, it always gets annoying when it tries to "improve" it's design.. -.-

[AustrAlien2010]

I suppose users need Notepad++ to view the content of 'shortcuts.vdf', and to effectively modify that file's contents.

[stupidguy]

Originally posted by AustrAlien2010:

If you go to
:\Steam\userdata\#\config

and open a file called 'shortcuts.vdf' with a text editor, then you can see that "AllowOverlay" is saved there, and is part of this file's contents.
The file 'localconfig.vdf', where it stores these settings for regular Steam games, is also located there. But that file refers to this setting as "EnableGameOverlay" "1".

Thank you. I had a situation where, despite the Steam overlay being disabled globally, my non-Steam games were still getting an overlay. You helped me fix that.

( Also, this thread is directly under the top result in Google results! )

---

For those who come after me, here's how to do it. You'll have to interpret if you're not on Linux:
1. Close the game.
2. Close Steam.
3. Navigate to the config directory containing shortcuts.vdf. On Linux, the full path to shortcuts.vdf is

~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/###/config/shortcuts.vdf

where ### concerns your profile.
4. Create a backup of shortcuts.vdf.
5. Open shortcuts.vdf. You can edit shortcuts.vdf with vim or any other text editor that lets you see and work with control characters (e.g. ^@ and ^B).
6. Inside shortcuts.vdf, look for the title you've given your non-Steam game in your Steam library.
7. Look for the first instance of AllowOverlay^@^A^@^@^@^B that follows that title.
8. Replace the ^A with a copy of ^@. Do not type it directly unless you know how to input control characters (^@ is one character, not two).
9. Double check that it reads AllowOverlay^@^@^@^@^@^B (5 ^@'s and a ^B).
10. Save.
11. Launch Steam.
12. Launch the game.
13. No more overlay.

---

Troubleshooting:
Is the overlay still there? Reload the file to see that your work's been undone. Close Steam this time and start over. (oops! I did this one.)

---

Notes:
- This also means that we can enable the overlay on non-Steam games by changing AllowOverlay^@^@^@^@^@^B to AllowOverlay^@^A^@^@^@^B.
- I suspect other editors will show you something different from what I see even if they show control characters. In that case, you'll have to figure it out. But generally the answer for disabling the overlay should be finding AllowOverlay, copying the first character after it, and using that copy to replace the second character.
- If you want to figure out why it's a ^@ for disable and ^A for enable, look at the rest of shortcuts.vdf for the pattern.