Nimdok

Yeah, I really just don't use Steam super-often, so I don't want it running all the time, and yes, I can easily just close it after I'm done playing a Steam game, but it's not... elegant. It's like making sure your ISO files unmount themselves when you're done playing a game, or that a regular program clears itself from the cache by default. It's simple and elegant and doing it makes things feel... clean. Thank you so much for screwing around with this and seeing if there's a way to make it work, by the way. I have/had no idea what Autohotkey was, and now I'm looking into it.

Let's start over; what do I need to do, step-by-step, to get the outcome I want (When I close a Steam game, Steam closes)?

I didn't see your edit to your earlier post. Do you mean adding the killtask command directly to the application path listing for the after command?

Emulation tab is blank, not using an emulator, just running it as a direct file.

I have. I am. It's not. The batch file I made before will kill steam if I just run it as-is. When I set it to run as an additional app in Launchbox and run the game, the batch file will either A) if set to trigger after the main EXE it will fire off immediately and kill Steam before the game even loads, or B) if I set it to trigger before but wait for exit it will never trigger.

See, try that. Tell me if it works. Because when I do that, it doesn't DO anything; it's triggering immediately after the main exe fires, so it closes steam before the game can start. If I run it while Steam is already running it just does nothing. If I set it up to run before the main exe but wait for exit, it still does nothing.

So I've been trying for the past few minutes to figure out how to get Steam to close automatically after I shut down a game that uses it that was loaded through Launchbox. What I've discovered is that, so far, I'm stymied by the fact that games that require Steam to run don't actually RUN, they just call Steam to open and THEN run from within Steam. So what seems like a basic batch file start /wait "" "gamename.exe" taskkill.exe /F /IM steam.exe doesn't ever trigger the second step. Trying to have the batch file run steam plus the game's Applaunch parameters leads to the situation where STEAM doesn't ever close, so it never triggers the second step. Having a dedicated batch file to just kill steam set to run after the main application under Additional Apps doesn't seem to do anything, either. Having it run BEFORE the main application, and waiting for the main application to exit, doesn't work; it seems to be ignoring the 'wait' part and trying to close Steam before it even opens. Any help would be appreciated.