Guide to Getting Steam to play nice with the NCSoft Launcher

If you're like me, you don't own a Steam copy of City of Heroes, but use Steam to launch the game and track when your friends are on. With a bit of experimentation, I was able to come up with a way to make Steam not only launch City of Heroes, but properly track when you're on and off-line.

You will need: Steam, the NCSoft Launcher, and City of Heroes, and a pound of bacon.


1) Open Steam, go to your library and click "Add Game" at the bottom left corner, then click "Add a non-Steam game". A list of installed programs will pop up. Ignore them and click "Browse". Navigate to the launcher's folder (Default is C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\Launcher) and select NCLauncher.exe. Now click "Add Selected Program". A link to NCLauncher should appear somewhere in your game list.

2) Now we have a link to the launcher on Steam, but we don't want it to open the launcher, we want it to launch the game. Right click on NCLauncher and select "Properties". You should see this, depending on what folder the launcher was installed in:



You can change the name (recommended) and the icon, but the most critical change to make is to the target. At the end of the last quotation mark, hit space and type

/LaunchGame=CityOfHeroes

[You can also substitute 'CoHTest' and 'CoHBeta' for 'CityOfHeroes' if you want links to the Test and Beta servers, respectively]

You should now see:



3) Now we have a link in our Steam library that will open the launcher if it isn't already active and launch the game, but getting this to work with Steam's definition of 'in-game' requires making a change to the behavior of the launcher (if you followed Hyperstrike's launcher guide you can ignore this step). Open the launcher and click File->Settings. Under the "General" tab, where it says "After launching a game", select "Exit Launcher".

Now, if you've done all this, clicking the link in your Steam library should 1) start the launcher, then 2) launch the game and then 3) close the launcher. You should be able to access the Steam interface in-game, receive notifications of when your friends are online AND Steam will properly notify your friends that you're playing City of Heroes. Now cook up that bacon and enjoy life.

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@Demobot

Also on Steam

Cannot thank you enough for this! I've been looking for a way to do this for months, it worked perfectly. Giving this a much-deserved bump.

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Hey, great guide, I've just run into a problem. Once I hit play City of Heroes in steam, It launches the NCSoft launcher just like it should, then launches City of Heroes and exits the NCSoft launcher. Then City of Heroes launches but stays as a blackscreen and I get a "City of Heroes is not responding" message from windows, and I have to exit.
Any help would be appreciated greatly.

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