How To Install Epic Games Store On Steam Deck

There’s no doubt that the best way to use Valve’s latest piece of gaming hardware, the Steam Deck, is within its native SteamOS operating system. It just takes a few steps to log into your Steam Account (or create a new one) and have instant access to your bursting library of games, ready and waiting to (hopefully) work just as seamlessly on the go. However, Steam isn’t the only digital distribution platform out there, and it’s certainly not the only one that works on the Steam Deck.

The Epic Games Store, with its weekly free games and numerous exclusives, has become a major force in digital distribution, and it’s a storefront that you can quickly access on the Steam Deck. The store has been available for Linux users for a long time now thanks to Lutris, which uses Wine to create a compatibility layer with the Windows version of the store, but you won’t need either to get it working on the Steam Deck. Here’s how to install Epic Games Store on Steam Deck.

Log into Desktop Mode

First things first, you need to boot your Steam Deck into the underlying desktop of its stock Plasma KDE Linux installation. You can do this by holding down the power button and hitting “Switch to Desktop” on the menu that appears. After a short transition, you should be in a familiar-looking desktop environment.

At this point you can continue using the Steam Deck’s native controller to navigate (you can bring up a keyboard by pressing Steam+X and control the mouse with the touchpads), but things will be a lot easier if you hook up a mouse and keyboard via Bluetooth or USB-C.

Install the Epic Games Launcher

Using the default Mozilla browser that is already installed, navigate to Epic Games’ website and download the Windows version of the Epic Games Launcher. Once that’s done, open up Steam, click “Games” in the top menu, and then navigate to “Add A Non-Steam Game To My Library”. You’ll see a list of compatible applications that you can link to Steam (Mozilla is one, letting you launch the browser from within SteamOS), but for now you should just click browse to navigate to where you downloaded the Epic Games Launcher installer.

If you haven’t changed any system settings, that file should be in your default Downloads folder, and accessible using the following path. If you’ve changed any settings, like your system name, make sure to replace [doorstop] with the name you’ve used accordingly:

“/home/doorstop/Downloads/EpicInstaller-13.0.0.msi”

Once linked, you should see the Epic Games Installer in your Steam library. Right-click it and click on Properties. From there head to the Compatibility tab, and check the “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool” option. This will let you choose a version of Proton to use from a new dropdown. Choose the most recent version and close the window.

From here just launch the installer from Steam as you would a game. An installation window, identical to what you’d see on Windows, should pop up. Go through the familiar prompts, and look at that–the Epic Games Launcher is installed.

Add the Epic Games Launcher to SteamOS

Now you could stop there, but what you might really want to do is be able to launch the Epic Games Launcher from within SteamOS. For that you need to do just a little bit more work.

Head back into Steam (still in desktop mode here) and right-click on the Epic Installer entry in your library again. Click the Shortcut tab, and there you should see two entries: “Target” and “Start In”, both of which should be pointing to the Epic Installer and the folder it’s located in respectively. To get the Epic Games Launcher to launch from within SteamOS, you’re going to need to change these to where the launcher is now installed.

This is slightly trickier than you might expect given the file structure that has been created during the initial installation. The easiest way to start finding it is by right-clicking an existing game that is already installed in Steam, going to Local Files, and browsing where those files are located. This will bring you to your “steamapps” folder within Linux, from which you can start digging for the Epic Games Launcher.

If you don’t have another game installed, or are just looking for the full path, you should be able to find the executable using the following path, granted you haven’t changed any system settings. You can also use this path to hunt down the executable itself if you have, using the folder names that come after “steamapps” to get there.

Target: “/home/doorstop/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/[numerical_identifier]/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Epic Games/Launcher/Portal/Binaries/Win32/EpicGamesLauncher.exe”

Start In: “/home/doorstop/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/[numerical_identifier]/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Epic Games/Launcher/Portal/Binaries/Win32/”

Once you’ve found it, copy the path to the EpicGamesLauncher.exe into the Target field, while using the folder path it’s found in for Start In (the same path just without the executable at the end). Make sure that both paths are pasted within quotations otherwise this won’t work. If in doubt, just copy the paths above, replacing the [numerical_identifier] with the unique ID assigned to the folder that was created during installation (this will be the highest value number in the /home/doorstop/.local/share//Steam/steamapps/compatdata folder). You can also change the name of this Non-Steam game shortcut to more easily identify it within SteamOS too, but that is optional.

The steps above can be followed in a great video posted originally by Gaming on Linux on YouTube, which helped us get this running on our own Steam Deck after numerous trials and errors with the Lutris route.

Getting back to SteamOS

To test things before heading back to SteamOS, simply click Run on this shortcut from your Steam library. The Epic Games Launcher should start up, letting you log in and install any games from your library. To return to SteamOS, just open the Start Menu and log out, which will immediately boot the Steam Deck back into its native operating system.

This is not the only way to get the Epic Games Store working on the Steam Deck, but it is the easiest way that has worked for us thus far. Lutris is bound to get an update too to make this just as easy if you prefer to use it for your third-party software on the Steam Deck. If you’re still deciding about whether to get Valve’s new handheld PC, check out our Steam Deck Review for the full breakdown on why it’s such an impressive gaming device.