This. I bought one year ago Empire Total War and wanted to install it. The only problem, there wasn't a setup.exe on the disc. Turned out that I had to use Steam for installing the game. I did that and finally wanted to start the game but I wasn't allowed to because there were newer versions of the game which means that I had to download 5GB of patches. Wut? But hey, I'm intelligent as fuck and so I used the offline mode of Steam. But again another problem, I can't start Empire Total War in the offline mode because of whatever reasons, so why does this mode even exist if I can't use it?!?!?!?!!?
Seriously, if I'm buying the case version of the game then I've the god damn right to play it without Steam.