99% of the time, if a game "should run fine" and nothing happens, it's because it's installed on a Windows partition (NTFS or exFat).

Try moving it to a Linux partition.

If it still doesn't work, you can start advanced troubleshooting.

Are you trying to run versions of the games that were installed through the windows steam app? If so, you need to do a fresh install through the Linux client.

You can run steam from a terminal, and it could show you any errors that are popping up during the game launch.

You using an Nvidia GPU? My husband gave me his old one, and it just seemed to give me all kinds of random issues that I never had before on my AMD GPUs. Just a thought.

I will second what someone else said. My husband had all kinds of issues when he reused his old NTFS drive in Linux. He reformated it to ext3 or 4 I think and hasn't had major issues since.

In addition to everything everyone else has said, the launch option: PROTON_LOG=1 %command% (from the wiki). It will create a steam-<gameid>.log in your homedir which can have lots of good wine/proton specific information in it.

You can also rename the user-settings.sample.py file in a given proton version in $HOME/.steam/root/steamapps/common/Proton - <version>/ to user-settings.py and uncomment the additional wine debugging options (PROTON_LOG is already set in this file, but it is not active until it's renamed or passed directly on the Launch Options line).

Do you have proton enabled?

If you don't have proton enabled, steam will try to launch the game but can't since .exe files don't run on linux. You're not getting an error because there's nothing happening.