several games not launching

[ellie-7734]

among us
dyson sphere program
plateup
satisfactory
we were here
we were here together
we were here too
we were here forever
and many more games (too many to list them all )

proton experimental
proton hotfix
proton 10.0-3
proton 9.0-4
proton 5.0-10
and others have been tested

new to linux and my games launched fine a week ago, but this week they begin to launch and then just nothing.

this PC started its life out as a window's machine and since Microsoft started their BS about feeding user data into AI data centers, i choose to switch to Linux. my boot drive is exclusively Linux my game drive is windows formatted. there was a glitch with my PC over the weekend when it forgot the mount path for my games drive. but i have since figured out a solution to get it to mount again by giving it back the mount path it once had. since this issue most of my steam games fail to launch. it would be easier to name the games that still work. not sure what the issue is, been trying and failing to troubleshoot this issue since 21 DEC 2025. any advice would be appreciated,

steps ive already taken.
testing comparability features by trying to force the games to play under the various proton versions.
uninstalling and reinstalling steam
rebooting PC
updating PC
repairing the library
a few other things i may have forgotten about.

[kisak-valve]

Hello @ellie-7734, please add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to a couple game's launch options and attach the generated $HOME/steam-$APPID.log to this issue report as a file. (Proton logs compress well if needed.) Also, please copy the contents of Steam Runtime Diagnostics from Steam (Steam -> Help -> Steam Runtime Diagnostics) and put it in a gist, then include a link to the gist in this issue report.

[ellie-7734]

hi @kisak-valve may i get more of a step by step instruction of how to do the proton log part you are asking me to do cause i am new to the linux platform and i do not know where to go to do a lot of these things, i only started using linux like a month ago. and half of that time i was trying different versions because some did not function the way i was expecting them to.

i am using CachyOS KDE plasma the first version i liked and did what i wanted it to do, until steam broke.

i am not a programmer and am very lost when it comes to debugging things. i have spent the last 3 decade using windows or mac and most of the time when a problem comes up they are much easier fixes.

https://gist.github.com/ellie-7734/80837e6c08fe0d6e98f7fe16558df568

[ellie-7734]

@kisak-valve i did add that proton log to the launch options via the properties for 1 game so far. i tried launching it, nothing new happened and my PC is struggling to find the log that it was supposed to generate

[simifor]

@ellie-7734 are there any proton games working on your end?
As far as proton logs go, if you were to get logs for among us, the resulting log file would be called steam-945360.log and it should be in your home folder. If the log file isn't even generated, then it sounds like the issues start before proton even has a chance to try and launch the game.

Something that might give more information if the log is missing is running steam itself through your terminal, then trying to run a game, and then going back to the terminal to see if any errors pop up there.

[ellie-7734]

steam-526870.log
steam-945360.log
are these what im looking for?

[ellie-7734]

i think the reason my computer was struggling to find the file is cause i have 40TBs of storage drive space 32 of it is specifically for games most of it is empty, but its usally faster if i navigate to a specific section and start the search on my own before enlisting the help of my computer due to how much storage i have cause i don't like uninstalling co-op games. cause like it seems to always be that my friends wanna play the one game i don't have immediately available to play.

[simifor]

From those logs I'm going to assume you are using a ntfs drive, if so that's likely the reason why nothing works. NTFS isn't recommended to be used on linux, but if you really must you can try following these steps to get it working https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

[ellie-7734]

steam-1599600.log
steam-474960.log
steam-648800.log
steam-863550.log
steam-1366540.log
steam-960910.log

@simifor i am not sure, cause i do not know which games are or are not "proton games" the games that i know are working are:
cities:skylines
alchemy origins
big pharma
antichamber

[simifor]

@ellie-7734 all those working games have linux native builds available, so they wouldn't use proton unless you specifically forced them to in the game's properties

[ellie-7734]

@simifor i already have the drives mounted properly and all these games were working prior to this last week. i have already rebooted since they were mounted properly.

[simifor]

@ellie-7734 again, ntfs is not recommended to be used on linux, specially with proton. The partition mounting isn't enough for it to work properly and it's prone to breakage. You can test this with a small game like among us, try installing it to a non ntfs partition and it'll likely work without changing anything else

[ellie-7734]

so the solution is to delete the thousands of hours of play time in the single player games and their save files that i have on my game drive and spend the weekend reinstalling all my games....