Steam Still Bugs Me Sometimes

When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, I had a healthy level of teenage nerd-rage going over the fact that it required Steam, Valve's online content-delivery platform. Over the years, Steam has matured into something I can live with, and even like. (Using Steam Chat to launch into a game of Left 4 Dead is delightfully seamless.) I bought HL2 at retail because I insisted on having a pretty box and physical CD's if something went wrong, but every Valve game I've bought since (and a few others) has been an online purchase through Steam.

However, sometimes it still bothers me, like with the problem I ran into a couple days ago. I think I've narrowed it down to a freak network issue, but nonetheless: No matter what has gone wrong technically, I see no justification, none whatsoever, for ever showing a user this message:



...regarding a locally-installed game!