"So you want to play a game, right? Not so fast, buddy, let us slap a useless piece of software bloat with zero added value for you but all the added value for us for you to look at." – Dev studios and publishers

This is what launching a modern game feels like:


Third-party account logins (especially for single-player games!), upselling garbage, privacy-trampling tracking and telemetry and analytics on you. And most of the time they're little more than a web browser, just without the features of a regular browser. Like navigation, or the place where normal people put their adblockers.

Launchers are about as cancerous as vertical video.

For some games it is enough to specify the main game executable itself in the game's Properties > General > Launch options.

Others, like Lightmatter, need a little bit more convincing.

The way that works for me is call a batch file which in turn calls the executable. This works for other games, too, like for Cities Skylines, where I use it to skip Parasite Paradox Interactive's similarily insufferably self-indulgent ego-stroking vanity piece.

1. In the game's installation folder ([…]\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Lightmatter), create a new text file.
   
2. Name the file launchersarecancer.cmd.
   (Make sure you really create a file that Windows' file explorer correctly identifies as "Windows Command Script", not "Text Document" or anything else. (… or equivalent as per your non-English display language, of course, if applicable.) Then again, if you're one of those weirdos who use Windows without file extensions visible, you shouldn't be allowed to operate devices run on electricity anyway and fully deserve to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥.)
   
3. Edit the file launchersarecancer.cmd with a text editor. Type this line:
   
   start "" lightmattersub.exe %command%
   Save and close the file.
   
4. In the Steam client's game library, find the game Lightmatter. Right-click the entry and choose Properties….
   
5. On the General page of the game's properties dialog, type this in the Launch options field:
   
   launchersarecancer.cmd %command%
   Then close the dialog with the X button in the top right. Any changes in the dialog are saved immediately.

From now on, clicking the green Launch button starts the game executable directly.