I know lots of you have grown with it so that's just the way it has always been for you and you are used to it, but older gamers, why do you need a launcher?
I've started PC gaming in the mid to late 90s but only when visiting cousins and friends. Got my first PC in 2001. I have some original games but I'm like 99% pirate, especially for "newer stuff" (read: anything that came out in the last 20 years lol). Modus was always the same: run the installer, click the shortcut, play.
I created a Steam account sometime in the late 2010s, I remember I did because I saw they were giving Metro games for free and I wanted to play them, and I started collecting free games that looked cool, but it really really bothered me that I needed to open their store to install and play the games. Even if I made desktop shortcuts their program would run in the background, and usually complain if I was offline... I just found everything so useless... run software to run the software I want to run, why not skip the middleman? Also I have always been on shitty hardware and I didn't like that extra RAM consumption going on in the background.
Eventually I stopped using Steam, deleted my account, and went back to piracy, but with the loss of some trusted trackers and stuff, and me starting running banking and other important shit on the same PC, I decided to start buying games, and then I found GOG, and what a godsend store! When I buy the game I get the installer so I can do whatever I want with it, and I don't need any third party application to install or run them.
I see a lot of people saying they don't buy games from other stores because their launchers are shit... but what do you even need a launcher for? Not having a launcher is my requirement to buy a game lol
Its for DRM. The easiest way to check if you actually own the game is to have the game contantly ask whether its connected to the server. The server should have your payment info. If thats not found, your game isnt legit.
Thats why GOG is so good, their games dont have DRM. Meaning you (and pirates) have a BETTER version of the game. Let me repeat that, downloading an illegal copy gives you a better running version of the same game you mightve paid for, because it doesnt have to contantly talk to a server before the game will allow you to do anything.
When you pirate a steam game, youre also downloading a "fake" version of steam, a steam emulator. The way they break DRM for steam games doesnt remove the DRM, but it slightly reduces the issues DRM causes because the server it is communicating with is local and doesnt have to index user files. Your game just asks the steam emulator if its legit, the steam emulator doesnt check anything, it just says that whatever got checked was legit.
Plenty of Steam games are DRM free and will launch just fine without Steam installed
GoG does have DRM games now, check out Hitman.
Also Steam has plenty of non DRM games, like Witcher 3 for example
Hitman was quickly pulled from GOG for being too big of a compromise on their values. Their only exception to DRM-free is multiplayer that uses GOG Galaxy services.