[Steam 4 Linux]: Game not starting, only Error message is "SteamAPI_init() failed"

Hello there, reader!

It's summer and this means it is steam sale! This is the good news :) But when you are on linux and you just bought some really cool game, you may still encounter problems due to linux only having received a lot of attention by game developers just for the past couple of months.

So did I, namely with the game "Osmos" by the Hemisphere game studios. I had bought it when it was cheap some days ago, installed it but couldn't get it to start. Clicking on the "play" button within steam would only pop up the "Steam news" dialog - at most.

Commandline debugging

So I started steam from commandline and dug into all the funny warnings it throws during runtime. But the only error I found in connection with my attempts to launch Osmos was 

"SteamAPI_init() failed" - following startup messages of Osmos.bin32 (Unfortunately steam only offers the 32 bit version of the game, although there is a 64 bit version available I think, google for Osmos.bin64)

Missing libs?

I recently switched to arch linux, so of course I thought of missing 32 bit libs at first.

Indeed I was missing lib32-intel-dri (the 32 bit intel driver for mesa) and I think lib32-openal too, but none of them fixed the problem - although the 32 bit graphics driver dramatically increased the performance of half life 1. You may still want to look at the aur package "osmos" to have a look at the immediate dependencies here. I also used the handy command "ldd" on Osmos.bin32 to find out about all libs used by the binary.

Exit: The solution

After a long time I grew more and more desperate searching the internet unsuccessfully, when finally I had the lucky thought to try out something I stumbled upon earlier without giving it too much attention: I did not exit steam via right click on the tray icon but via the "steam" entry in the menu bar of the program. It's funny, but it seems like this is the only way to make steam apply certain updates on shutdown. At least some additional lines in the console output mentioning "package updates" suggest that - and really: After starting Steam again Osmos would finally launch!

Résumé

So I thought I might share this little piece of info with you - namely that you should use the menu button to exit steam from time to time to make sure your installation stays up to date.

If you have some other game making trouble, have a look at the arch wiki's "specific troubleshooting" section here.

I hope this helps. If you liked this, I would be happy if you left me a comment.

See you later, yours

suluke