Non-Steam game issue

[{TWO}JohnBattman]

Added a non-steam game to my library but has no artwork, icon, title, background, etc. I can launch the game no issue from, but it's going to be annoying adding additional non-steam games and I have to click through each one to find what I'm looking for. Let me add that whenever I go into the Steam properties, it doesn't save anything. The window is blank and will let me type the target and start but it doesn't appear to save/cache that data.

[lsdninja]

Assuming I understand correctly, that’s normal. You have to manually add those things yourself if you want them.

[Nx Machina]

Because it is a non Steam game, whereas if you get the game on Steam all those you are missing are there by default.

[Meowish]

It seemed to be one of those steam .vdf file corruption like the screenshot file but this one is for the shortcut file (Shortcuts.vdf). This happens when Steam client crashed out without a proper save to the .vdf files and part of the file become unreadable with blank entries.

Note, Reinstall steam will not fix it due to those corrupted files remained after uninstalling. You will need a clean uninstall for it to work.

There are methods without uninstalling like, You may need to delete some of those folders and related .vdf files and let Steam rebuild them after a restart or use the Repair Folder option in Steam Settings to fix them.

In your case the folder will be:
(SteamDirectory)/userdata/(SteamUserId)/config

The easiest way is to Exit Steam, then Delete Shortcuts.vdf file in the above mentioned folder, and restart Steam after that and wait for Steam to rebuild the .vdf file. (May take awhile depending on how many shortcuts you have added, and worst case scenario, you may lost all the none steam game shortcuts in your library and may need to re-add all of them after the new .vdf file is build)

My advice is keep a backup copy of the .vdf files, they often gets corrupted if you didn't shut down Steam properly or force close Steam when you shutdown/restart your PC.

[76561199501708866]

Thanks Meowish it worked

[Steve]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.