I took it to be him whining he bought a physical game from a store that required steam and didn't have internet which honestly is relatively uncommon situation to be in.
But yea steam has an offline mode and doesn't do any of the shit like Ubisoft was putting into their games before steam started taking over.
I did buy the disc. I had internet but like I said broadband was new in the area at the time and they were still working out the kinks. Who knew what Steam was back then? Lots of games needed side software, be it Direct X, Gamespy, whatever. You figure 'meh, as long as the game works I can remove it when I'm done'. There was no way to know the harm that was being unleashed. Literally it was the first time I couldn't play a game outside of a power outage. Only took a little while to discover Steam was the source of my trouble and thankfully it didn't spread to my other games like UT, Quake, Worms, etc.
You tell your story every chance you get but it always just sounds like a problem literally no one else has ever had and you realistically should have gotten over a long time ago.
But you hold a grudge. Damn do you hold that grudge.