Problems launching non-Steam games (Launcher/64-bit/Overlay)

[Broken Haiku]

I want two games/apps that I run often, to be shown in my status on Steam, however:

• one of them uses a launcher, and as soon as the game launches and the launcher quits, it doesn't display anymore.
  
  
• The second one just won't launch at all if added as a non-Steam game (works fine outside Steam). I'm guessing this is either due to it being a 64 bit application, or because it doesn't like the Steam overlay. I've seen no way to disable the Steam overlay for non-Steam applications/games though.

Is there a workaround for any of these issues?

[Laptop]

1. World of Warcraft?
2. What game is that?

Not all games will work with the Steam overlay. Especially older ones.

[Broken Haiku]

1) SWTOR.
2) Is actually Renoise, a music program that I want to show when I'm in.

[Laptop]

1. Nothing you can do I'm afraid. Although you could see about launching the game directly, though I can do this with WoW, but I don't know if it is the same case with SWTOR.
2. Well not all programs will work with Steam.

[Broken Haiku]

1) Tried that, no go. I was hoping for a smart workaround.
2) I know that, thus I'd be great if one could turn off the Steam overlay for a non-Steam game. I can't confirm that this _is_ the issue, but it's most likely.

[ragtag]

I found a workaround for disabling the Steam overlay in non-steam games. I was trying to add a launcher for Sim City 5 (yes...yes...I know it's evil), and it would open the launcer for a second, and then crash because of the overlay. What I did was launch Sim City 5 through a .bat file. Then point my Steam launcher to the .bat file, rather than SimCity.exe. You'll need to change available file type to all (instead of .exe) to be able to browse for the .bat file from Steam.

The file is simply called launch-simcity.bat, and looks like this:

@echo off
start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\SimCity\SimCity" SimCity.exe
EXIT

A command prompt will pop up for a fraction of a second, and then the Sim City 5 launcher and Origin will start.

There is no overlay in Sim City 5, but also no message in Steam that you're playing a non-sim game. I guess you can't get both of those.