Tl;dr Step by step how I setup lutris to run pirated games

I use Lutris, its pretty easy to setup and is pretty much the same setup for most games.

Install lutris wine and winetricks with your package manager. Wine is a windows compatibility layer for linux and winetricks is a helper for downloading and dependencies that a game might need and lutris integrates both of these.

In the file manager, I like to create a folder with the name of the game and then inside of that folder I make 2 folders "game" and "prefix" I put all of the game files in the game folder and leave the prefix folder empty for now.

When you open lutris, on the left, hover over wine and click on the little box icon to manage the wine versions. I recommend, wine-ge. Its a custom build/fork of Steams Proton that adds some extra stuff

Once you have installed that, back on the main page at the top left is a + to add a new game. Select the bottom option, "Add locally installed game". Give the game name and select "wine" as the runner from the dropdown.

Then on the next tab, Game Options, select the games executable location, inside the "game" folder. Set the Working directory as the "game" folder. You can just copy the path that you put in the executable section and backspace until the folder called "game".

For wine prefix, copy the working directory path and replace "game" with "prefix" this is where all the wine/windows stuff will install.

Set the Prefix architecture to 64-bit

On the next tab, Runner Options, you can select the wine version you want to use. It should default to the wine-ge version you installed. At the top right press save and your game should be good to go. There are a whole bunch of other options you can play around with but for pretty much every game I've played I just leave them as default.

This should be fine for most games but sometimes wine updates can break older games and so you may have to try older versions of wine-ge or different versions of wine like lutris-fshack or wine-staging. Or the game may need a special dependency that you need to install. This is why I set a separate prefix directory for each game.

You can look at the logs for a game by selecting it and pressing the arrow beside the play button, this may or may not be helpful for trouble shooting.

If you do need to install an additional dependency, select the game and press the arrow at the bottom right and select winetricks. "Select the default prefix" should be selected by default, press ok and at the top of the next screen you should see the path to the games prefix, then select the "Install a Windows DLL or component" Then you should have a list of packages you can install.

If you're using a repack that needs to be extracted, put the path to setup.exe as the executable on the Game Options tab and run through the installer, selecting the "game" folder that you created as the install location, it is probably under the Z drive. Then when you're done installing, right click the game in lutris and press configure and then back to game options and replace the setup.exe path with the path to the games exe and save.

There's a whole bunch of other ways to do this, like bottles or just using system wine or adding the game as a non-steam game to Steam, I have a separate throwaway Steam account for this.

I like the way lutris is laid out and I like having separate prefixes for each game because I archive the games I like and its nice to have a known working prefix in that archive for games I had issues running.