[extrememacaroni]

chill bro all mmos and such have used launchers since the dawn of time

[doublerabbit]

Yeah? Sure. Quake 3 never needed required a launcher.

[viraptor]

Q3 was from times without trivially available persistent internet connections. You had to hunt down the patches and mods yourself manually, hoping not to get malware instead. It was a different time. The updates also were much more spread out - last 3 were from 2001, 2002, 2006.

It's just not comparable to how things work today.