Steam Overlay through launcher?

I have no interest in locking my game to gabe newells buttocks, but the overlay is useful. However neither starting the launcher through steam or the exe directly results in the overlay functioning. I presume this does work on the steam version, but as I said I have no interest in switching over. I just want the overlay. I wonder why it doesn't work with the launcher version?

Steam overlay is added by valve not uber, it will only be available after said DRM adding and mutilation to main executable is
done by the valve API.

Edit forgot to add the API bit at end

You're wrong man. Any non-Steam game added to Steam can work with overlay just fine.

Also many games on Steam do not use Steamworks at all.

I don't know what you think that means. The overlay injects into any process that is launched by steam. Certain things can make it fail such as launchers.

I found the issue by the way, the launcher seems to be fine. It's the bit-agnostic PA.exe that is the problem. Apparantly it opens just to detect your bits, then closes and launches the correct exe. Closing causes steam to think the game has ended. You need to add the bit specific executable.

I tried that, it's didn't work.

what about adding the link in steam to point to the exe in the bin_x64 dir?

side note, i haven't been able to get overlay to work in any of the games i tried adding (battlezone 2, freelancer, and starwars battlefront 2)