Fixing Steam's Non-Steam Game Icons

So here's a fairly niche (maybe) issue that I've faced today. I wanted to add a non-steam game to my Steam library, which is easy enough to do, and once added I wanted to furnish it with custom artwork, which is also now fairly straight forward. You can usually set the artwork by just clicking in the correct spots on the a non-steam game's page but you can also do it from the properties window under the customize tab. I'll assume that you already know all this.

The issue I faced was that when I added the game (which actually was technically an application, namely RetroArch), for whatever reason Steam did not like it's executable icon file and would not set it. The result was the library shows RetroArch as having a blank icon and if you open its properties there's a blank icon next to the name on the Shortcut tab too. Most people who fiddle with these settings know if you click on the box where the icon should be under the Shortcut tab you can just pick a new icon file, or go to the game/app/whatever's executable location and select that instead, which is what Steam should do by default anyway (i.e use the icon file embedded in the executable). This used to work, but now it doesn't: Picking an image simply does nothing and you're still left with a blank icon in Steam.

Not only that but the available image formats have changed too when you open the popup explorer window to pick an image. Now it refuses to show ICO files with the file type drop down list only allowing you to pick from PNG, TGA or EXE files (although a trick with Windows Explorer is you can ignore the file types drop down menu and just type *.* in the address bar at the bottom and hit enter and it'll show all the files in a folder regardless of what the file types drop down says. However despite this minor workaround, picking an actual ICO file (or anything else for that matter) still doesn't work.

While it could be a bug in the Steam client, upon scouring the Internet I found suggestions it could also be an issue with Windows, or the image files you're trying to use, or various other potential problems. In other words there's no clear explanation for it, however there is a fix; one I came across years ago for a somewhat related issue in the Steam client (which was eventually fixed by Valve). I'm only going to be talking about Windows here incidentally, although I imaging if you have the same issues on Linux it's largely going to be the same procedure, just with some slightly different file locations involved.

Firstly get your image ready that you wish to use as an icon for the game in Steam's library. Ideally you want it to be the right dimensions as well, something square like 192x192 (that's the size I used). Make sure it's in PNG format (since Steam only wants to use PNG or TGA for image files in this instance, you might as well stick to that even though the function doesn't actually work). Now you want to Right-Click on the Non-Steam Game's entry in your library, select Manage and pick Add desktop shortcut. Go to this shortcut on your desktop, Right-Click on it and select Properties. In the URL box, it'll have something written like steam://rungameid/2532734930202927256325. Copy the string of numbers you see after the last slash in your shortcut as that's (as you might have guessed) the ID Steam's given your Non-Steam Game. Now rename your image file to that string of numbers. You obviously want it to keep the .PNG extension as well.

Finally cut and paste that image to the location of the Steam grid folder. By default it'll be in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\[Your User ID]\config\grid. You'll probably noticed if you've set other artwork for the Non-Steam Game that they'll be sat here too. Once the image is in place just quit Steam and start it again to see the changes. Done and dusted.

It worked for me, but if it doesn't work for you I would suggest you go back and make sure your image is properly formatted.

Workaround Steam Non-Steam Game Video Games