system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does majority of software need to be installed?

Is it because of fear of piracy or maybe the software needs to be decompressed?
gpt
It would certainly work to tell the user to download lots of files and have them put them in a specific directories, but it would be a pain. So having a single file to download is nice. This is some sort of archive format. It makes sense to compress it since download speeds are slower than having the CPU run the decompression. Adding an installer let's the software do some additional integration, like adding icons, putting configuration settings in a standard place. Letting the software be started as a service/daemon using standard tools, putting the main executable in your path, have it open certain file types by default.

Tldr: convenience.