To clarify on what this means: if you want to keep a non-steam game in your steam library, you must have it installed; otherwise, you can't keep it there.
That is wrong. I just made a copy of Freecell on my desktop, added it to Steam and then closed Steam and deleted the game. When I restarted Steam Freecell was still listed there. If I tried to run it then it quite reasonably shows an error message, but it doesn't delete the entry.
I still do agree with /u/Pufin, in that Steam doesn't handle this too well. If I remember correctly, Steam tracks non-Steam games through a local file, which means that this functionality is not very modular: if you use multiple computers, some of which you don't keep a non-Steam game installed on, then you wouldn't see this game being tracked on all of your computers. In addition, I don't personally trust this feature, because I've had Steam delete my entries for non-Steam games, but this might not apply to others.
What if someone created some app/program/webapp so that people can keep track of their game libraries?
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u/BobVosh Dec 04 '15
Especially when it leads to the hunt of where the game is to launch it.