Answer: Because of Microsoft.
Probably, many people wondered why, with each installation of a new game through Steam, it additionally installs DirectX, C ++ Redistributable, .NET Framework? Can’t you just check for them? So Microsoft made it impossible. The problem is that there are many versions of these components, different for x86 and x64 platforms.
In addition, the only way to distribute them is to run the installer, which is also the only way Microsoft supports to verify that the installed version is correct. That is, if the DirectX you installed is the latest version because you ran the newest version of the installer, it does not guarantee that all previous versions were also installed. And, unfortunately, there is no backward compatibility here – each game is aimed at a specific version.
Microsoft does not provide a way to manually check for correct versioning because there are many files, all of which must be present. The code for verifying the correct installation and fixing the incorrect installation is located in the installer itself, and only running it ensures that the correct files are present at the time the game is launched, and prevents the game from failing to launch with unknown errors if the correct version is missing or the installation somehow failed unsuccessfully.
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