Putting this in a guide since none covered this until now. Hope this will save people the trouble of having to go through the forums and wasting their time trying solutions that won't work. Here is one that does:

In order to boot the game without going through the launcher, simply right-click the game in your library, go to properties, and in the "General" tab add the following under "Launch Options":


That's it. That's the guide.

And to all the developers out there: please stop pulling this useless crap on your loyal playerbases. Thank you.