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Ah launchers, don't you just love them? A reoccuring nuisance for Steam Deck and Desktop Linux gaming is that they can and will break and the latest to break (again) is Battle.net. Here's how you can fix it for now.

Firstly, for people just using Proton on Steam Deck and Desktop Linux direct through Steam you can use the bleeding-edge Beta of Proton Experimental. As posted on X (Twitter) by Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais:

Initial Battle.net fix has been pushed to the [bleeding-edge] beta branch of Proton Experimental. Timing of mainline Proton Experimental availability is TBD.

How to do that? Find Proton Experimental in your Steam Library and go into its Properties -> Betas -> and select bleeding-edge from the dropdown box.

Another solution that you can try is to use this as a launch option on any Proton version in Steam:

WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1 %command%

For people using some form of Wine / Proton in Lutris you can add WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY with a value of 1 as an environment variable in the system options inside a Wine runner you're using.

It can be frustrating when this happens, and it's certainly far from the first time Battle.net has broken along with EA, Ubisoft and other extra launchers. Thankfully this time it's an easy enough sort until it's fixed properly inside Wine and Proton directly.

Update - 17:17 UTC: If you use Wine-GE, the latest Wine-GE-Proton8-25 release has a fix for it.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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16 comments
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tpau Dec 1, 2023
Quoting: Pengling
Quoting: RaabenIt seems Bnet has been breaking fairly often as of late. It's a shame since I remember it being one of the more reliable ones in WINE;
I'm not too surprised, honestly, since they're Microsoft-owned now.
Wine blames CEF, the chromium embedded framework. Sounds like it isn't necessarily Microsoft at work here but just a Chromium Framework <-> wine incompatibility.
Ali_John Dec 1, 2023
Got myself a new system and this thing wasted me 2 days. Funny enough Lutris or Wine does not have an issue on their Github page about this. I found it on lutris discord on one channel as a pinned message... comon guys no reddit no github. Why is information sharing so bad with linux communities?
tohur Dec 1, 2023
Quoting: TSpencerhmm, so far i've had no issues whatsoever in the past 16 months with battlenet on steam deck, sure they might now be owned by microsoft, but the online games microsoft purchased are licensed out to ubisoft for the next five years. that would definitely explain the issues that others are having with loaders (although i haven't had any myself) since ubisoft loaders break constantly

Ubisoft ONLY has the streaming rights, not "online", "offline" or any other rights, so in other words Ubisoft has squat to do with any ABK game other then streaming it outside the United States


Last edited by tohur on 1 December 2023 at 11:06 pm UTC
Mountain Man Dec 2, 2023
Adding the command line option worked for me. Thanks for that. I was so frustrated I was thinking of buying Diablo IV directly on Steam just so I wouldn't have to mess with the Battle.net launcher, but that would have been silly. How I wish Blizzard would do the right thing and just give us all Steam keys.


Last edited by Mountain Man on 2 December 2023 at 4:31 am UTC
oldominion Dec 3, 2023
Or just delete the folder: Battle.net.14542

which is in /home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Battle.net

If you have an older folder in there, for example Battle.net.14494 it will work again.
ElectricPrism Dec 11, 2023
Quoting: Highball
QuoteFor people using some form of Wine / Proton in Lutris you can add WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY with a value of 1 as an environment variable in the system options inside a Wine runner you're using.

Also works great for Bottles too.

<battle.net bottle>->Options->Settings->Compatibility->'Environment Variables'

Prior to this tip. As a work around I opened the file explorer for the bottle and deleted the battle.net.14542 version under the battle.net installation directory.

Worked, thanks :)
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