This is a bad take in general, if your computer can’t handle running steam it probably can’t handle many games to begin with. It’s the least intrusive option presented so far in terms of DRM, and steam has done more for the Linux gaming market with Proton than any other company afaik. You have to launch steam to avoid games wanting to do things like denuvo or kernel level anti-cheat which is WAY worse, and those of us on Linux need steam running while we game for additional reasons. This complaint about not wanting to look at a storefront is just petty, especially when I’m pretty sure there are settings to open it directly to your library.

This just seems incorrect? I have it on steam not game pass, but you leave the game in the options menu, and it shows controller icons for me just fine.

Hitman 3 has a custom offline launcher known as the Peacock project iirc, super good time, let’s you unlock all gear and play exclusive timed events and stuff whenever you want

I’d say a GameStop gift card should be fine, they should be able to buy most games there except for PC games, and if that’s what they’re after they should be able to spend it on a card for Steam, Roblox, epic, etc at GameStop. Same logic should also apply to a visa gift card I would imagine.