Don't forget you gotta update your driver's too before even beginning "Launch Steam"

For most games, including ones on Steam this is what I do.

Being up program launcher with key combination.
Start typing name of game, hit enter.
Then if Steam is not open Steam launches,. Game launches.

Get yourself a launcher program. Having to bring up Steam and search a library of dozens of games seems maddening when you could just type a few letters.

Minesweeper might be the only game I know that opens directly into play game. Everything else "then" still needed us to press play.

I used to have the irq of my sound blaster 16 memorised because you need to put it in for every game.

I love the fake "offline mode" of Steam which for certain game, doesn't work.

I knew it was already shitty 20years ago when Steam get popularized by this shitty game (Counter Strike),

People praise Steam, but it's one of the most bloated, unnecessarily convoluted examples of feature creep on my machine, and it always wants to run in the background and check for updates. Even when I do remember to exit properly, it takes several seconds of thinking before it closes. I've resorted to using task manager instead.

Almost any launcher is less annoying to me than Steam, but then I've never been one to use or want the various social aspects. I wish there were a lite version for people who just want to use it to buy and play games.

i'm tired of software constantly needing to download fucking updates for every little fucking thing. you can't just use sEcUrIty as an excuse to make things 2000x more annoying