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
You don’t. When Valve first started with Steam, everybody hated it. I myself held out for a long time, not wanting a useless program hogging resources.
But gradually it became clear that Steam was actually just a game store. Except having to go to a store and rifle through boxes, you could do it from your PC. Yes it launched the games, but that was just like having a single folder with all game shortcuts. Its main purpose was discovering and buying new games.
Other vendors saw its success and wanted a piece of the cake. I think they mistakenly thought the launcher was an important part of Steam’s success, when it was in fact the large catalogue and good discoverability. They use exclusivity to lure customers, but can’t possibly compete with Valve.
Now we are at a point where the landscape is divided again. The majority of games is on Steam, but enough have their own place that the “single folder with shortcuts” became relevant again. That’s where the likes of Heroic and Playnite come in. These are no longer stores to buy games, but are simply a convenient way to quickly start the game you want, regardless of its source.
It's really easy to forget, but yes, Steam was annoying back in the day. I hated it so much I bought Borderlands 1 from somewhere else in protest. My friends bought it through Steam. The patch dropped and they got it, I didn't, and I couldn't play anymore. It finally came later, though. This pushed me to give it a second chance. Now it's amazing. Apart from some gripes about the UI of Steam itself, there's not really much to complain about.