That number is not a game id, rather, it is a subscription, for example number 1 is the Halflife Platinum Pack which includes eight goldsource games. Personally I'd rather not have the extra network traffic of looking up the human readable subscription name when we're trying to launch the steam client as fast as possible.
If you want to know what an individual subscription is, goto http://steamdb.info/sub/1/ and change the number to the package you want.
EDIT: Sorry about the formatting errors.
It doesn't need to download them. They could be combined on database on hdd. Or downloaded when requested. But I would like to have more information that steam is doing. Half of the messages it shows I have no clue.
Basically you're right and this could be a nice improvement. However, IMHO there are more important things to spend development time one than this. And on windows you never see that message at all so basic information useful for debugging should be okay. And license IDs (the numbers) are sufficient to debug problems related to them.
The code could be like this:
when you log in 1st time. Steam downloads the names for a database.
When you log in second time it checks if new titles have been added and if so tries to download them to database.
So we do not need to huge databases of titles (if they are huge).
@Tele42 is right, these are package names, and not always well set by the developers… and they can also contain multiple app ids (games) per sub.
If you visit steam://open/console and run licenses_print you’ll see all this with names alongside.
Closing as subscriptions are no longer included in stdout logs.
Nothing extracted yet.
When you start steam on console it says something like:"Adding license for package 17487"
Why not make it announce what it's currently adding? The item name.
Adding lisence for dota2.
Or something. Who the hell remembers serialnumbers of games?