5 days
that “a little effort” meant specifically finding the way to launch games without Steam, I reckon. apparently most games on Steam have only the very basic Steam DRM: make a back up of the game, deal with the DRM, and keep it available to play whenever
If I’m not mistaken, the russian forum usually has standalone patches too. if not, you can probably get the full game updated to the latest version from wherever and copy-paste everything into the game’s folder