I don't really understand what causes apps to get put into the Game Tools category on Flathub. I had a look at what its 23 current entries have, and:

• 15 had Game and Utility
• 2 had Game, Network and RemoteAccess
• 2 had Game, Utility and Qt
• 1 had Game, Utility and COSMIC
• 1 had Game and Network
• 1 had Game and GTK
• 1 had Game

So although they're inconsistent, Game and Utility looks like it would probably work, but somehow Game on its own also works in one case?

However, another aspect is that the categories affect what sections of KDE's applications menu (or whatever the equivalent to the Windows Start menu is called) LOOT appears in. I installed ProtonUp-Qt (which has the categories Game;Utility;) and that appeared in Games and Utilities. LOOT currently only appears in the Games menu, and I want it to stay that way - to me the Utilities menu is where miscellaneous utilities without a better category should go, and I'd rather have LOOT sit with the games that it operates on.

Looking at the Flathub docs and the main category registry and the additional category registry it looks like the GameTool additional category is a better choice than Utility.

I don't know if Flathub would put something with the GameTool category in its Game Tools category: I searched its GitHub org for mentions of GameTool and the only mention was it being removed from an app's desktop file because some utility doesn't support it, but I don't know if that's relevant to LOOT.

Game + utility and game + network are supported, the others are probably an oversight on your end or a bug on our side

GameTool is what ultimately will replace this, but I don't think the new category has shipped (or shipped in enough places)

Game + utility and game + network are supported, the others are probably an oversight on your end or a bug on our side

I checked again and it looks like the others were cases where the .desktop categories were overridden by the metainfo categories and I hadn't noticed before, so they're all game + utility or game + network.

GameTool is what ultimately will replace this, but I don't think the new category has shipped (or shipped in enough places)

Oh, I didn't realise it was a new category, do you have any idea how long it might take to ship widely enough to be supported? (E.g. are we talking months, or years?) Personally, I'd put avoiding LOOT appearing in the Utilities section once installed as higher priority than having it appear in the right sub-category of Games on Flathub, so I'm inclined to wait for GameTool to be adopted rather than add Utility now.

That said, is there any reason why I couldn't add GameTool now (so the categories are Game;GameTool) so that it's ready for whenever GameTool becomes recognised, or is the issue that Flathub or other things error when they encounter an unrecognised category instead of ignoring it? (I'd try it myself, but I'm getting DNS errors in my VM today when running the Flatpak builder...)

From our side it's just flathub-infra/website#5785 and maybe some cleanup after that. But as far as I understood submissions are hard blocked on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/desktop-file-utils/-/merge_requests/26

I'm not sure, if DEs need some work then, to allow such categories, adding icons etc or if it will just work (I guess DEs like gnome will be fine)