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   arcanicanis (arcanicanis@were.social)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Nov-2025 11:18:46 JST arcanicanis

   I was recently contemplating ways to get a person's "currently playing" info (given there's no local API to query that directly from the Steam client, for example), then it crossed my mind that a Steam game's AppId might be passed through launch arguments, and apparently that's the case (for example, ATLYSS):

   somebody 576533 0.1 0.0 29480 23876 ? S 20:40 0:00 /bin/sh -c /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-launch-wrapper -- /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=2768430 -- '/home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper-arm64'/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- '/ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental'/proton waitforexitandrun '/ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/ATLYSS/ATLYSS.exe' somebody 576534 0.1 0.0 29004 5756 ? S 20:40 0:00 /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=2768430 -- /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper-arm64/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- /ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/proton waitforexitandrun /ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/ATLYSS/ATLYSS.exe somebody 576843 10.3 0.1 232648 60504 ? Sl 20:41 0:00 /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayui -pid 576734 -steampid 3248 -manuallyclearframes 0 -gameid 2768430

   Then I was having a concern of whether I'd have to query third-party platforms (e.g. SteamDB), just to infer the info about a game, from just it's AppId, but I guess there's actually an open, unauthenticated JSON API to query that data directly from Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/api/appdetails?appids=2768430

   So as it stands, it wouldn't take much for a person to write a plugin to whatever XMPP (or etc) client, to push out that data, for those that want that visible.

   Meanwhile, for open source launchers (e.g. Lutris), I'm sure someone could probably devise some userspace D-Bus API or something that a person could push that info locally (versus having to infer it off of running processes and their args).