This game installs some random low reputation anti cheat from japan that I have noticed some very strange behaviors from.
First it maintains running even when the game is closed, including tray icons. Also it starts on boot up regardless of boot up settings.
It seems to be sending some packets of data to japan IPs while the game has already been closed.
If you made the mistake of installing this very suspicious application it took me some time to discover all the traces of it on my PC but I believe I have completely removed it.
first uninstall the warlanders game from steam. Check to make sure that C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat is gone, not just empty
open a commandline and run C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat\setray.exe --unins2 just to make sure
search your whole PC for ses.exe and setray.exe. Delete any traces that occur
Then go here: C:\Users(put your username here)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Sentry Anti-Cheat Notification.lnk <- delete that
finally I searched quite a bit in the registry and mostly everything in the registry is gone relating to this AC. However there still is an entry so get rid of that
Win+R button
type regedit.exe
then navigate to this section:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SentryAntiCheat <- right click that and press remove then confirm
Anti-cheat software is designed to own your machine, take away your control and monitor you. They are indistinguishable from malware. Valve should be taken to task for not only allowing this malicious software in their platform but also for actively distributing it to users.
Thank you for citing this. I favorited it as yet another example to cite whenever the topic comes up.
Seems to be a trend with japanese companies. Check out the wonderful consequences of allowing these corporations access to your computer:
Especially since Valve already has anti-cheat malware. The reality is that the only way to combat cheating is to stream it to the client but as we've seen with Stadia, it's just not quite there yet. Instead, they turn your machine into an internet-cafe appliance and prevent you from undoing it. To find cheaters, simply look at stats and behavior. You don't need to lock down a PC. You need to lock down your logs server-side.
It's also pretty scary that it's open sourced so more developers can use it. I cringe at having to fight root kits with every game uninstall. I'm a huge fan of games that detect cheaters in subtle ways and direct them to unintended outcomes. Like being stuck in the elevator unable to escape. Or what COD is doing with cheaters, taking away their senses and ability to see people or objectives. Kids will complain it's a bug or what not on the support forums only to expose themselves and get banned.
> Instead, they turn your machine into an internet-cafe appliance and prevent you from undoing it.
Exactly. It disgusts me to my core, the audacity of these corporations.
> To find cheaters, simply look at stats and behavior.
Partially agree. This is especially relevant in skill-based games but I assume such statistics can be poisoned by cheaters over time, increasing false negatives. There are also game designs where bots are literally indistinguishable from sufficiently addicted players. Think anything with a reward schedule in the game design: MMORPGs with timed spawns, mobile games with timed rate limited gameplay. Especially the latter.
In the end, Linus Torvalds is right about security: if the word "trust" isn't involved, it's not security, it's masturbation. We should be playing games with friends who we trust instead of randoms from the internet.
At an individual level, if a player goes from 1.3K/D avg over a sample and then it jumps to 8K/D over the same sample duration later, it’s pretty obvious.
Wall hacking and aim bot can be caught with behavior and statistics. Not in real-time but damn near.
Not quite. I understand that's a piece but if you've ever tried to solve this problem it's not even close to being as easy as you make it out to be.
1. The stats you cited (k/d) is well within normal variance
2. It's not super common for cheaters to run around spinbotting/blatant wallhacking. I would actually say that's the minority.
3. Depending on the game, that would never happen because MMR just matches you up with people based on your new "skill" i.e. 2 games with 8K/d puts me in harder games and I go back down to something reasonable. Again, most cheaters don't continue to just dominate, those are the minority and get caught easily.
So it’s not as trivial as I make it sound, yes, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. People are working on just that. These things wouldn’t get you banned, but these are “early warnings” that you’re cheating and warrants further review of game footage (which most games store in the cloud now). It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science. AI behavior patterns combined with game footage review combined with a judiciary would cause one to be banned. The future of esports though is in closed edge networks with dedicated hosts. Provide them with the Internet cafe appliance. I just want to play some Counter-Strike. If I were to average my K/D over 1000 games I would get a pretty good statistical spread of how I play on certain maps. Granted theres a degree of variability depending on my mental state, but still a good enough sample to get an idea of how I play Dust II. Sudden and consistent outliers above norms would flag me for review. 2,3 kill cams and footage review would tell you that I’m cheating. Someone in Burma or Thailand could do that job until the AI is trained to spot aimbots, cough I’m sorry, “flick shots”.
Damn smurfs, good point. I would be defenseless. In reality you would go with a multiple angle approach but you are certainly correct. Behavior modeling would suggest you’re the GOAT. 100% of the time.
My own stats in games have fluctuations more extreme than your example.
Some days I’m multitasking while I play games. Some days my mouse battery dies mid game. Some days I’m really sharp and I’m up against people who aren’t as good. Some days I’m not as good and I’m up against people who are really sharp.
Wild fluctuations are normal for a human casually playing games.
Yes. Obviously what happened is that the player is away - on holidays, in hospital, etc. - and their younger sibling uses the opportunity to play the game on their older sibling's machine. And the younger one is much better at this class of games.
That, or any other of many scenarios that go against the idea that an account is used by one and only one person.
Funny, that's exactly the kind of profound lack of empathy and awareness my ex-wife had. "Do anything you want to prisoners; there's absolutely NO WAY I can possibly imagine being in that position myself" (I find this particularly amusing since she did far more actually illegal stuff like drugs etc in college than I ever dreamed of; but these emotions are always outwardly oriented:).
The whole point of this thread is that these systems are not installed on cheaters in a targeted way. They are installed on everybody's computer. They make far far far more innocent gamers suffer than they punish cheaters. And we've seen time and again that these systems misidentify cheaters badly. Think of all the times your Norton of McAfee misidentified your bit torrent client or your open source utility or your own crypto mining software for malware, and multiply it by a thousand.
Hilarious. They're just people exercising their freedom. It's their computer, they can hook into the game's code if they want. I bet many of them are themselves hackers, worthy of respect. I bet many of them post here. When I was a kid I remember seeing people in forums who hacked games to make them harder because they played the shit out of it and were bored already.
These corporations? They are merely guests on our systems. Every single thing they think they can do? It's because we allow it. We allow their game to run at all. We refrain from modifying it. Everything they do, it's a privilege and we can revoke it. Ruin their PC? Good luck with that. If people care enough they'll reverse engineer your game and make their own version without all your bullshit.
"Hackers"? No. You are being "hilariously" ignorant about the current state of cheating in online games. The vast, vast majority of cheaters could be described most charitably as script kiddies, and even that is a stretch. They pay monthly subscription fees to cheat makers to get the ability to exercise their "freedom" to grief other players.
Whatever. I guess I never lurked in those circles. The real hackers used to shame them and run them out of forums. Maybe you shouldn't be playing with these skids at all instead of aksing for non-solutions that do nothing but normalize intrusive corporate malware.
I don't fault the skids either. As far as I'm concerned they have as much computer freedom as I do. The only solution is to whitelist the people you play with.
It’s a multi-million dollar business now. Make a cheat, add a paywall, charge people. Lookup “The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov” on YT [1] (nvm, here is link). This is an epidemic not some leet hacker proving he’s master over his domain. It’s kids and young adults paying Mr.X $9.99/mo to see thru walls and auto shoot your dome.
If you compare the Valorant and CS:GO communities, the Valorant community has a much easier time onboarding people and a much smaller cheating problem. That's all because of Vanguard, their much more intrusive anti-cheat that uses an early mode kernel driver.
VAC (user-mode) is easily broken for the most part so players willingly navigate to external platforms for CSGO like ESEA and FaceIt which use their own hand-rolled intrusive kernel mode anti-cheat.
Maybe it's best if Microsoft just baked this into Windows. It's intrusive, but clearly players demand it for competitive games. Streaming isn't a solution to that, the latency is unacceptable in shooters.
Notably, these kernel drivers work because the cheat makers are not able to create their own kernel drivers. Microsoft requires drivers to be code signed, and Microsoft will not code sign cheating software.
Unfortunately, that also means you and I can't run our own driver code, on our own purchased machines! I find this really crappy for reasons which have nothing to do with anti-cheat. For example, I can't install modified nVidia drivers.
You can temporarily but it needs to be manually re-enabled again before every single boot. Also kernel anticheats will detect that test-signing is enabled and refuse to let you play.
The people who want to tinker with unsigned drivers is many orders of magnitude smaller than the people who would accidentally install a malicious driver and ruin their PC.
They had to make a choice for UX sake, they chose the bigger group of people and are happy to let the tinkers go to Linux
> Streaming isn't a solution to that, the latency is unacceptable in shooters.
I avoid streaming for that reason, but it's not unthinkable to play shooters with high latency. For years in the late 90s we played Quake 1 with a 150ms ping and had a blast. If non-streamers were disallowed that might actually be a good platform for fair competition.
> For years in the late 90s we played Quake 1 with a 150ms ping and had a blast
Yes, that's right. But it's also a completely different sort of lag, you can't compare network lag to input lag. With net lag in a game like quake you had to deal with players not really being where they seemed, but at least the game still resonded to commands when you issued them. It didn't take 150ms for your character to start jumping after you hit the jump key. That's unplayable. Also we had mods for dealing with net lag, the "unlagged" mod that let you shoot players where you saw them, not where you really are. It worked well if you were playing with people who didn't cheat.
Incidentally, I remember something else about playing Quake in those days: I didn't need anticheat, and nor did any of my friends. We ran private servers and did our own matchmaking. We didn't need anticheat because we chose not to play with cheaters in the first place. If any of us were secretly cheating, it wasn't severe enough to be noticed and therefore wasn't a problem. Anticheat only becomes "necessary" when matchmaking is taken over by the company, you're made to play with strangers instead of friends, and when everybody is encouraged to take it suuper seriously with global ranking nonsense that encourages people to treat the game like a career, not like a game. I really hate this trend in modern games. I'm sure it drives "engagement" but it encourages players to develop unhealthy attitudes and obsessive behaviors.
The ability for gamers to run their own servers on their own networks is sadly the reason we are where we are. I understand the business model of why, but from a common sense perspective it’s better for the game if you let people police their own groups/matches/membership like we used to.
Instead, only “authorized providers” are allowed in most cases, that charge you a lot of money for the privilege of having a dedicated host, if at all. Worse is when the game company themselves provide the servers without the ability to choose.
When we could host our own, at home or at school or in the work IT closet as a “storage controller”, we could control the experience. This is why Minecraft because so popular, mods yes, Twitch Personalities, probably also, but the ability to host your own world with friends and hold them accountable for blowing up your house at school the next day was why it became a phenomenon with kids.
Sure, you'd still have video capture and hardware controlled cheats but those can be mitigated as well. No FPS that I know of has a "max turn rate" due to the twitchiness of the mouse. Want to look behind you and then back in front in 2ms? Crank your mouse sensitivity all the way up. I've seen some hardware mouse controller cheats in the wild. They aren't that good. There was one that used a video feed and AI to "software control" the mouse but that can be detected as well by reading from the hardware directly. Mouse input is pretty standard USBHID shit.
> No FPS that I know of has a "max turn rate" due to the twitchiness of the mouse.
Descent did, famously different max rates for vertical and horizontal, so if you want to master fast turning, you've also got to master rolling so you can turn in the direction you want at the faster rate.
I don’t categorize Descent as an FPS. It’s more a space-shooter. It was one of my favorite games growing up, that, and TIE-Fighter. Descent was very much in the realm of Wing Commander and TIE-Fighter but inside Doom Levels. Space-sims have always had weird physics as part of the charm (much to the hatred of the developers). Wall Running (strafe running), Rocket Jumps, Roll-Turns, things that are side-effects of non-uniform physics or physics effects that added to the gameplay so it was left in.
My current mouse is one of those little RF dongles, The protocol is surely not complicated if there was an aimbot on the other end and would be completely invisible to any anticheat malware on the machine. Or just plug it in and have it emulate it directly if you want to eliminate any latency...
Find cvcheat with a quick Google. Looks like the site is not in English though. Curious to learn more, it’s fascinating problem and rat race. Wonder how this tech would fair against csgo over watch.
Yes, but those are external anyway so a kernel-based anti-cheat system wouldn't be able to catch them anyway. The point is to be better than the invasive stuff we have now.
> but as we've seen with Stadia, it's just not quite there yet.
.... if you are using Stadia as an example of the capabilities of this technology, it is a mistake. Stadia was always the least capable of all the game streaming services.
As someone who games exclusively on the cloud, including competitive online multi-player games, using services like ShadowPC, GeForce Now, and XCloud - I contend it is quite closer than you think
I recall many years ago one of the Command and Conquer games decided I had a pirate installation and blew up all my units in an on-line game. No, I had a perfectly legitimate copy that thought it was pirate because I had done an over-the-top installation of Windows because it was corrupted. Most everything worked fine and didn't need reinstallation.
Money quote: “Essentially, [CAPCOM.SYS] provides ring-0 code execution as a service! Its only function is to take a userland pointer, disable SMEP [thus allowing the kernel to execute from userland-owned pages], execute code at the pointer address and re-enable SMEP.”
It's a "legitimate" corporation. The malware has a "legitimate" purpose. The user "technically" agreed to the abuse when they mashed next on the install wizard.
I seriously doubt any anti-malware software will block this.
Yep, this should be a solution... stop the malware from working, and if the game doesn't work, the users can refund it (since the gameplay time will be 0 hours anyway).
Let the developers (well... managers) deal with the refunds then.
I didn't mention them because while it was a DRM rootkit it had to do with anti-cheating software which is what this particular thread is about. I've indirectly mentioned them in other posts.
I'm not sure they should refuse to distribute it. But all those things on the comment should be actively disclaimed with high emphasis before you buy the game, and stay available for consultation indefinitely afterwards.
I mean, yeah you are right calling those out, but there is a plethora of vulnerable drivers from e.g. mainboard and GPU manufacturers, very often installed by default on new machines.
I would distinguish between an Anti-Cheat actively doing shady stuff (like it seems to be the case here) and companies simply shipping crappy software - because that's too often the case in many areas.
That's no excuse. I call those manufacturers out too. The truth is these hardware manufacturers treat software as a cost center, don't invest in it and make shitty software as a result. Honestly they shouldn't even be writing software at all, they should be publishing specs so that better people can write it and mainline it on Linux where it belongs.
At least they aren't literally in the business of making malware designed to own people's computers with the express purpose of denying them their computing freedom. That's ultimately what "cheating" is: an exercise in computer freedom. The game is running on my computer, of course I can modify it if I want. Any attempt to prevent me from doing so obviously requires that the computer not obey me anymore. The only thing that separates this crap from malware is some terms of service document nobody reads.
I've always been aware that all proprietary software is potential malware but I always gave these developers the benefit of the doubt until the actual vulnerabilities started surfacing.
I remember my very first comments on reddit years ago were on a news post about some flight simulator software exfiltrating your browser's saved username and passwords directly to the game company. Let me see if I can dig up that thread.
You hit it with "they shouldn't be writing software at all, they should be publishing spec". I've been wanting to roll my own board for a long time (not the hardware, the boot and os side) but haven't outside of a raspi or arduino. I'd LOVE to be able to write my own motherboard code to have a better boot experience (somewhere between Apple Mac's and uSplash Linux) that's fast to user-land.
There have been some companies that recently announced this kind of approach (at least with linux) but overall, we need our computer industry to be more open, we need more accountability of shady practices (exfiltrations!) and modern laws to allow people to protect themselves from these corporations that mean to steal our data.
It absolutely is an inherent problem of anti-cheat software. By definition, that software exists to deny you the freedom to cheat or otherwise modify the game. The only way they can possibly do that is to pwn your machine.
Don't generalize that to all software. Free software doesn't do that. GNU was literally founded on the principle of not doing that.
Plenty of software will kick you from servers or even kill the game process if they detect anything, including false positives like some suspicious string in a completely unrelated chat application.
Who cares though? Fine, you can say they monitor you. The point is: to monitor you, they gotta pwn your machine. If they don't you can just defeat their silly "monitoring" software. They own your machine by installing kernel mode malware into your OS. They literally rootkit your computer.
That’s not a “problem” with anti-cheat, it’s the entire point. It is a group of people who have chosen to give up their freedom to modify their games in exchange for the ability to play with other people who agree to the same.
It is okay for private clubs to have rules for the conduct of their consenting members.
FOSS is great for allowing individual freedom of software developers. It doesn’t provide functional solutions for all of the worlds problems, though.
Based on that I’d guess an algorithm or maybe even person wrongly marked this as instructions for disabling anti-cheat software, without realising that it’s instructions for doing that after removing the game.
These instructions actually look somewhat strange to me: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SentryAntiCheat, which is removed at the last step, would normally be the “Add & Remove Programs” list entry, right? Is the poster confused and did they not notice the anticheat in that list? Are the anticheat authors storing bogus data there? This whole thing seems peculiar.
Uninstalling a program via the Add or Remove Programs GUI doesn't clean up the registry entries. I noticed this awhile ago and realized I had hundreds of old registry entries for games I had uninstalled a long time ago.
Plus, most people using Steam uninstall games through Steam. So if Steam isn't cleaning up the registry that entry will stay there. I don't think the registry entry will do anything, but it can't hurt to remove it manually.
I always wonder why people keep attributing this to cheap/unskilled labor.
At one level it really doesn't matter as the company is choosing who works for them, and the outcome of their action is the company's action. It's Valve's fuckup anyway we look at it.
At another level, qualified and well paid employees also take shitty actions. I'd argue they're often less prepared and less professional than contracted customer support.
Because it's out of character. On Steam there are practically no restrictions whatsoever on what you can say in reviews. Even completely irrelevant, off topic, risque, or meme spam reviews are perfectly kosher. A reasonable and relevant review being removed makes 0 sense, and is not something Steam would ever do. So it's obviously somebody who's working for them, that shouldn't be.
Of course I do agree with you on accountability. Companies should not use volunteers for remotely relevant positions. If they do, and those volunteers screw up, it's on them.
But I'd contrast that with the reaction when people get rejections from the AppStore for instance. They're not blaming some proverbial intern for that, they'll rightfully blame Apple, either for inconsistent decisions depending on the reviewer, or lack of clear rules, etc.
It says on the page, "This review has been banned by a Steam moderator..." Probably not even a contractor, but just a volunteer. And now Valve is taking a significant PR hit because of their ineptitude. You get what you pay for.
It's not about the censored review. The story here is about the fact that people who marked this review as helpful got punished for doing so. And that's an order of magnitude more severe fuck up.
Cannot testify for this case but Bulk Crap Uninstaller[0] is usually a reliable way to fully uninstall tenacious windows programs, including potentially left over files and registry entries.
ShutUp10 (also works with 11) does this but with a nice UI, and allows you to individually toggle settings, as well as undo them. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
I would be very careful with stuff like that if you don't have the capability to audit what you will be running, especially without permission from corporate IT.
It's seems like an anachronism that Steam games are able to install random junk on your system. Those game installers should be completely standardised and most importantly sandboxed.
Similarly, IMO it feels shoddy when Steam acts as a "launcher for another launcher" when starting a game.
I haven't seen anyone in these threads propose an alternative to Anti-Cheat. Just not using anti cheat makes popular games unplayable. Everyone has the choice to just not play them but plenty of people do, and accept the trade off of handing control of their PCs to a third party to do so.
I seem to recall a game giving me the option to install anti-cheat, with the caveat that anti-cheat was required for multiplayer. While it only solves the problem for people who stick to single player, at least the option exists.
Likewise, it would also be nice for the option to exist for private servers. If the server admin trusts their users or is okay with anything goes, there is no need for anti-cheat.
This is what I can't wrap my head around. Every multiplayer game I ever played on PC had cheaters in it. The anti-cheat stuff seems like it just inconveniences the good guys, and does little to stop the bad guys, so what's the actual point? I play on consoles now, and the fact that there are no cheaters is probably half the reasons why. I've seen video of Battlefield 1 on PC these days. It's comical, as long as it's not happening to me.
Bans come in waves. So they let cheaters cheat for a bit... but they are recording all the programs and processes that everyone is running. Then, once they see the issue as being big enough to warrant action, they ban the highest "80%" of people running the cheat, in the last "3 months" (or whatever time period).
I'm sure there's some magic threshold where they say, "Eh, this kid only had it running for a week, and the account he was running it on was 8 years old, and gosh... we really don't want more customer support calls and complaints. Let's let a few slide." I'm sure there is some sort of "how serious is this offense" algorithm.
Video games have so many cheaters, but it's rare for the accounts to stay active for more than 3-6 months.
But you're right, they should ban faster, and they should do more to stomp out cheating. For people who play by the rules... it seems unjust that they don't ban faster.
One theory is that they time ban waves to increase sales. "Oh sales are down this month, better ban some more folks so they'll re-buy the game with new accounts."
Don't forget, in a lot of games, players buying in-game currency (or items) is what fuels bots / cheating. The game makers need this sort of behavior to keep some percentage of "legitimate" players (the indirect cheaters) happy and on the platform.
I'm sure they have all the math worked out. They ban at exactly the pace needed to maximize profit.
I imagine it's similar to the logic behind locks on houses. Thieves still exist, but by making it harder for them, you reduce the chances of them targeting your house. You won't ever reduce that chance to zero, but you can reduce it significantly.
Similarly, I imagine the more effort you have to put in to get through anti-cheat software, the more likely you are you give up and play a different game. There'll still be some people determined enough to bypass it, but that number will be smaller than it would be otherwise.
Fwiw, I don't play these sorts of games, so I have no idea if this stuff is effective, but there's a comment somewhere in this thread saying that Valorant has fewer cheaters than other, similar games, in no small part due to their aggressive anti-cheating measures, so anecdotally it may well have an effect.
I'd encourage you to check out Counter-Strike servers which are NOT VAC-secure. Or, well... I don't know how much these servers exist anymore, with matchmaking being so dominant. But back before CSGO, if you joined a server that didn't have VAC enabled, you would have about a 90% chance of it being unplayable due to speedhacking, spinbots, etc. The other 10% was probably still full of people fine-tuning their use of aimbots, wallhacks, etc.
Off the top of my head, Genshin Impact is a mostly single-player game with some multiplayer functionality. It uses kernel level anti-cheat to make sure that microtransactions are protected. This driver had a known vulnerability that did not get patched for years and was used by malicious actors: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
Street Fight 5 did the same thing; it was possible to unlock characters for local play using a trainer. They patched in a rootkit with known vulnerabilities in an attempt to prevent that.
I don't really think that's true. the content is usually in assets and just behind some flag that gets activated via some callout to a store, but there's not active anti-cheat software making sure that you "actually bought the content" in general()
() technically a lot of games have anti-piracy measures that are somewhat active, but they're rarely of the "phone home" variety
"anti cheat" is the lazy solution, you can just buy it and be done with it, and if it fails you can blame someone else until they stepped up their game in this cat and mouse game.
Take that whole tarkov meltdown for example (YouTube g0at tarkov cheater). Everybody is screaming "needs moar Anti-Cheat" left and right when the first thing I wonder is "why is the server sending every client the position, health and inventory of every other player all the time?" - obviously the answer is because it's the simplest approach. But it's by far not impossible to continuously run hitscan between all players on the server and not update any player positions for players that can't see each other. But of course that takes time and effort to make work reliably, so let's just install a ducking rootkit on every player's computer and use the developer resources to instead add microtransactions or whatever.
Anti cheat is part of the cat and mouse game it seems. If you think there’s a way without anti cheat you should try to write a serious proposal. There’s a lot of money involve in solving this plague in competitive gaming.
Read my comment in it's entirety please. There's one very obvious improvement I suggest pretty much off the top of my head, I'm sure if you want to you'd come up with a dozen more. They aren't even trying.
I agree with you. There are several major games that transmit all player info at all times when it's really not necessary and makes "ESP" style hacks possible, which can be supremely unfair. Developers would rather tack on a rootkit than make engine changes to resist this kind of cheating.
Ok ok. Some are not even trying that’s true, but not everyone.
But when I try to play a battlefield game these days you often get hackers who can go really fast across the map. And detecting them sounds super easy server side.
Tarkov is very questionable. The timing and unnanounced nature of gear, progress and character wipes was so user hostile, I stopped playing it entirely. My friend and I buddied up to get good at the game and clean out labs.
After six months we were just good enough to approach Labs and Nikita's team pulled a Wipe out of the blue, the very next day.
The cheaters are openly coddled. The 'famous' streamers are avoided by cheaters because of the unwanted attention, so they make the game look good by accident.
It's a damn shame that a mechanically fine game like Tarkov is ruined by Nikita and his pals playing cowboy with the game's management. Tarkov costs more than equivalent FPS's (2x the price) just to be treated like trash by the devs.
A clear opt-in should do the trick. Maybe even with some percentage indicating how much you'll miss without? (e.g. not much at all if it's mostly single player, everything if it's a competitive persistent works like Eve and something in between if there are both "open" and "regular" instances)
Valve is the only organization that could pull that off, and it would further deepen the entrenchment of their position as the meta gamemaster of all PC play.
It's an important problem for fair interaction online in the future, I think.
I believe the only real alternative would be something at the hardware level. Your hardware should be able to get into a mode where an executable has a protected memory address space, and maybe even a protected relationship with GPU memory and displays. Otherwise I think all anti-cheat tends to be
(1) Fragile, relying on OS mechanisms that can be often bypassed;
(2) Extremely intrusive from a security and privacy standpoint: they need to monitor your system, almost everything it's doing for any attempts to read or modify relevant memory or control input to give unfair advantage (or say bots) to some players.
Finally, I guess we should remember there's always the famous 'analog hole' (a-hole) that defeats all mechanisms from simply capturing output and feeding it to another machine (that's very hard to plug). But because it really need dedicated hardware and significant effort, a hardware level anti-cheat would generally be a very significant solution to cheating without sacrificing users rights.
Community servers where the gamers are also the admins is the 'traditional' fix.
Matchmaking killed off that option, so we're left with controlling technical solutions like kernel code and relinquishing the client-side benefits entirely in favour of cloud gaming.
Honestly, I have no idea why people think Anti-cheat can work anymore than you can stop 0days or secure a bank account. Computers were fundamentally designed to be open machines that accept input on every possible level. We've locked ourselves into chasing a horse that's already bolted. Trying to secure the multi-headed hydra.
The day anti-cheat is possible, is the same day you end piracy, kill the cybersecurity industry and shut down 'unauthorized' code of any kind.
Do we really want that? Better to make cheater-policing the job of gamers themselves, with community servers and better tools.
Botting can't be prevented anyway due to the analog hole. People are already making HDMI-capture + USB HID emulation devices for that purpose.
Outright manipulation of game-state is a classic computer security issue. Just don't trust the client, calculate that on the server. I believe many games are doing this properly already but especially mobile games still suffer from it because they trust the client more to paper over intermittent connectivity problems.
The information-disclosure kind of cheat, wallhacks and such, can be addressed by game design that minimizes the amount of information exposed to the client.
One choice would be to price out cheaters. Have people pay a one-off fee for access to a premium tier of multiplayer servers. If you cheat, your access is pulled and you've got to go and spend more money to get back in.
Something Awful did this with their forum and it does a pretty good job at keeping spammers and other irritants out.
Didn't CSGO have something like that with their Prime account status? From what I've seen it wasn't very effective, people will gladly spend obscene amounts of money for an unfair advantage and/or to ruin other players' fun. It might cut down on people using blatant hacks in place of more subtle ones though.
That only works if they are using blatant instant snap-on aimhacks - which I fully agree should be checked for since that's one obvious target. If the aimbot is a bit more sophisticated where it mimics mouse movement though I don't see how that would work.
Also unlike macOS or iOS/Android sandboxes, it’s not a process level thing, but rather a VM of some kind.
Plus, if it did introduce sandboxing like macOS, you’d see so many people getting pissed off when their applications start asking for permissions, as can be seen in every single thread that comes up here with regards to macOS.
Personally I think every OS should have sandboxing by default (perhaps as an opt out) because no amount of being cautious as a user is enough to prevent application overreach.
Windows containers are crapshot. Unlike linux containers you must match the exact kernel version. And GPU acceleration is iffy, which is important for games.
I want complete, end-to-end sandboxes, including for:
- Android apps
- Chrome extensions
- System apps
... etc.
These should be capable of providing fake data to the app (e.g. simulating no contacts, no working internet, or a fake GPS location), and trying to break out should be an app store ToS violation.
Finally made the switch to run linux by default, there is a nice Flatpak for Steam which works quite well. Not the biggest fan of flatpak but to cleanly isolate steam I'll use it anytime ^^.
Still keeping windows as dual boot but I only switch to play multiplayer but since I run it only occasionnaly I care a bit less which crap get installed.
Chromium's sandbox on Windows is built on top of Windows features (tokens, jobs, desktops, integrity levels, app containers)
Just like how their sandbox on Linux is built on top of Linux features (setuid, user namespaces, seccomp, SELinux, AppArmor)
For both Linux and Windows, the OS kernel gives you a bunch of features you can use to construct sandboxes, but the choice of exactly which of those features you use, and how you put them together, is up to you. Chromium worked out how to combine those features to meet their own security requirements, and has documented that in detail, and open sourced the implementation – there's nothing stopping you from copying the same approach, assuming your requirements are sufficiently similar
With macOS, Apple ships a sandboxing mechanism in the OS, known as "sandbox" or "seatbelt", which is what Chromium uses there
Let me go up the stack one level: why does Windows allow this kind of software to install at all !? Couldn't most cheating methods be defeated by requiring a signed executable to run, coupled with a complete lock of the input methods to the signed executable running?
I'm at a loss as to why the debate here is on Valve and the devs, when I can't get past the initial step: you can install THAT on Windows?
Jeez. A walled garden gated by a bureaucratic rubber stamping process (which I'm sure can't scale with the pace of software creation) sounds awful.
Path of lesser resistance: sandbox games. And have weak (serverside)/no anticheat. Cheating in games isn't as big of a deal as malware in your kernel[0,1]. It's just not that important.
It seems to me that the security mechanisms you described already exist. But Microsoft can't prevent the installation of legitimate anti-cheat software while still letting users install whatever they want to. It is a double-edged sword, one comes with the other. Users who seek this kind of protection (i.e., OS editor telling app makers what they can or cannot do) should drop Microsoft and switch to Apple.
Also, we should not confuse anti-cheat software with malicious software: if you purchase commercial software from an editor who wants to bundle anti-cheat technology in its product, this is not a malicious installation. The security mechanisms you described are aimed at preventing the malicious deployment of code in your system, not the installation of intrusive software on behalf of the consenting user.
Yeah, just drive the final nail in the coffin of personal computing freedom. Make it so that Microsoft owns your computer instead of you. Windows clearly doesn't suck enough with its advertising and telemetry and forced rebooting, they should just turn it into iOS already. Game companies and their needs are the most important thing in the universe and it's OK to give up our freedoms and control just to play shitty online games with internet randoms.
does sandboxing work for things so performance intensive as high end 3d games? (this obviously doesn't apply to low-fi games, including low-fi 3d ones)
That's not true, games without DRMs installed through Steam can be launched without having Steam running. It all depends on the publisher's policy, Valve is just complying.
In fact sometimes it's required to do that for modded installs, because Steam can't be convinced to launch anything without force updating first anymore and breaks everything if you're not eternally vigilant. sigh
I've resigned myself to mostly just buying anything I want to mod from GoG unless it has full Workshop integration.
There should be this thing called 'Free Market', where you don't have to buy whatever stupid improvement is pushed onto the folks.
But this platform was awesome for independent developers, who could use it to sell their game, get payments, do the license management, anti-piracy, some amount of support, and even make the installation straightforward for the user (so less support to offer)
I can totally get why developers would use Steam to retail their games
But let's not forget that clients can be a nuisance, and won't work if they just push features with no value. Games for Windows Live was a nightmare, for exemple
I'm stuggling to make sense of your points. To the extent that I can't tell whether you're coming down on steam or not.
But one thing that isn't relevant here is the "free market". The "free market" refers to a system where prices, production, and distribution of goods and services are determined by supply and demand, without government intervention. Examples of threats to the free market include monopolies, price fixing, government regulations, and trade barriers.
Steam is not a monopoly, indeed it's one of many ways of getting gaming entertainment. It very rarely even has exclusive games (unlike say XBox and Playstation). It does not,to the best of my knowledge, engage in price fixing or impose trade barriers on others. Government regulations are not relevant in this context because they are not a government entity, nor to they receive preferential treatment under the law with regard to permission to engage in selling software.
My point was that Steam's point was not focused on the user, it was neither the client nor the outstanding features that made it popular.
They were driven by a solid business plan, not "features".
It's just a convenient proposition to retail games, because it's easy for the developper, and securing for the buyer.
This was an addition to the parent comment.
And the previous comment complained about the Steam launcher. The comment was fair, especially on lower end PCs with an old school HDD. He felt like someone was bloating his PCs with functionalities he didn't need.
So yeah, the Steam launcher is there because it's a technical requirement to retail games.
But I don't agree that it was successful for its new features. It's just ok because it sells games.
Games for Windows Live tried to do the features without actually retailing the games, and it didn't work.
And I will not reply further. As usual, there are more downvotes than actual replies. I never understood Reddit mobs on that.
>There should be this thing called 'Free Market', where you don't have to buy whatever stupid improvement is pushed onto the folks.
... you mean the free market Steam operates in? Go use another digital distributor. Go start your own. Nothing is stopping you. I will continue to use Steam because of the value it provides.
But that is how licensing works for Steam games (that require it). I don't want invasive rootkits, locked down software, or resource consuming software. Steam is light compared to other alternatives. The best option is to buy games from GOG (or another DEM-free store) or from publishers directly, assuming they don't have a crappy launcher. Epic Games Launcher, 2K Launcher, Riot Client, Rockstar Games Launcher, etc are awfully slow and consume a lot of memory and disk space. Steam just happens to be the lightest of them all and therefore people tolerate it more.
What Steam does isn't what annoys most. It's what game publishers do with their own launchers.
My GOG account suddenly broke (500 server response upon login) back in 2016 after adding The Witcher 3 to it, and despite repeated attempts over the years to demand that they fix it and restore my games, it remains broken. All I've got are empty promises to look at it, but no results.
You’re totally right that this is bad, unacceptable customer service and worth criticizing. Don’t take my next paragraph as an attempt to downplay your problem, because I agree with your justification.
That said: unlike Steam games, your GOG games are not lost when your account gets FUBARed, so long as you backed up the installers. GOG provides that capability; Steam does not. I do back up my GOG installers, just in case I ever get locked out like this. I can’t do that with Steam.
You either have the games or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
With the prices of hard drives these days, anyone that truly cares about this stuff can save up and back up game installers. You don't need a fully fledged NAS server with four drive bays loaded to the brim if all you're going to do is occasionally sync the installers with GOG.
Hard drive prices are around a cent per gigabyte these days. With today's absurd game sizes, that's a $20 "keep it after the cloud service shuts down" surcharge. Not great, but not impossible to overcome either.
Nobody backs up their installers because it's much easier to just rely on cloud providers keeping around your game installers forever. That doesn't mean it can't be done if you actually care.
Yes, I remember how happy I was when GOG was announced, that a digital store with that ethos would exist. It's a shame that it has since become soured like that for me.
Steam itself is optional, it's up to a developer to require steam to be running. Steam does some things like make the default shortcuts launch Appa via steam, but honestly that's probably less confusing for the games that do enforce steam running. Without steam running, there's no access to any of the steam SDK features. Steam running also handled things like authentication, so games don't need to prompt for credentials.
That's true. I call the Steam API when my game launches and it replies with whether the Steam app is running or not.
If the Steam client is not available you simply lose Steam's Input API (customizable controller support) in the game. As a developer I would avoid requiring the Steam client to be running. That's just bad for users.
However, there's no reliable way for as a user to tell if Steam will be optional for a particular game. I've tried checking pcgamingwiki but it's not always right.
Valve's own games can't be played without Steam. If Steam isn't running when you open Portal 2, Steam will be launched automatically. If you uninstall Steam, Portal 2 just won't start.
It would be one thing if Valve was setting an example that publishers were choosing to ignore, but that's not what's happening.
They might offer a small block of metadata indicating which parts of the API the change uses in its current incarnation. Would fit in nicely with the details about which platforms it can run on.
It is. But I feel like It's a compromise that works for all parties involved. Publishers are atleast calmed by the fact you can't just copy a game from machine A to B, and people who are in the know can strip steamstub with an open source tool that shall not be named here.
Very much untrue. Steam even makes it pretty easy to start a game without starting steam.
1. Install the game through steam the normal way
2. in your steam client, go to the game, hit the cog icon
3. go to "properties" -> "local files" -> "browse". This will open a file picker in the location it has installed the game.
4. Make a note of this location then close the picker
5. Go to "general" and see if there is anything under "launch options".
6. You're all set. If you want to shut your steam client down you can still run the game directly by using the path you saw in the file picker at step 4 and (optionally) passing the launch options from step 5
(I know this because I'm currently running "Song of Syx" directly using this option because it's an early access game and is broken when launching via steam for some reason).
Way to move the goalposts buddy. The post said "without starting steam" so I replied with how you can do that, not how you can run games without the steam client installed at all. That said if you don't like steam just don't use it. I don't see what would be the point in installing steam, buying games using it and then trying to play them with it uninstalled. At that point you would already have paid valve and literally only be hurting yourself.
Often with good reason, the Steam API provides some very nice APIs (cloud saves, mods, controller input mapping, multiplayer sessions, etc.) that can be assumed to be available if you're only selling your game through Steam anyway.
You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though. All you need to do is build (or download, if you've for faith in your antivirus software) a few DLLs and drop them into the game folder: https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator
> You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though.
I have actually tried to use these on purchased games. They sometimes work, they sometimes obviously don't work, and they sometimes appear to work initially but then cause weird bugs deep into the game.
Somehow when I buy games on GOG I never have to worry about this.
The user that posted the review had their account returned to normal [0] around the time this was posted.
They were told by Steam support that their "account was locked for promoting or posting malicious content" but the message didn't explicitly mention the review. Their review is still "banned" though. Steam support adds "We've gone ahead and removed the lock. In the future, please make sure you are not spamming or advertising" which makes it sound like it wasn't just the review they had a problem with. But trying to read into support agent messages is like reading tea leaves...
If the review is banned, it seems that the review in question was the reason for ban/lock.
I wouldn't read into "please make sure you are not spamming or advertising". They could write "please make sure you are not harming anyone" and it would not suggest that the user attempted to do so. It's just a trashy, corporate replacement for "we fucked up and we're sorry".
> If the review is banned, it seems that the review in question was the reason for ban/lock.\nI wouldn't read into "please make sure you are not spamming or advertising".
Having said that, (that is what I said), the message was convincingly human for a support agent response. They didn't need to use so many words. [+also]
> They could write "please make sure you are not harming anyone" and it would not suggest that the user attempted to do so.
It would though, that's why they write things like that. The point is to reinforce that the recipient is/was at fault. They don't talk about specifics. It "makes it sound like it wasn't just the review they had a problem with".
[+also] it didn't say "After careful consideration we've decided to uphold the original decision. We recognise that this may be distressing to you. xoxox YoursTubey"
I wish steam didn't have an effective monopoly on PC video game distribution. It was basically forced on us when CS 1.6 required it. But people will choose the option even slightly more convenient for them against ethical costs.
I frequently see people here justifying chrome over Firefox due to a really small feature relative to maintaining a healthier web.
Steam is possibly one of the least worse monopolies that have existed. It doesn't block the products from being sold on other platforms, takes care of quite a lot for those who use it.
I think it is lesser evil compared to having dozens of stores and accounts to manage with some of them dying and taking the products down with them. If you were to play range of titles you could possibly end up with quite many clients running in background, just for that having single big player is positive.
Their acceptance and willingness to distribute anti-cheat malware is really the only black mark I can think of on their otherwise very good reputation.
There's also the whole skins thing, but yeah generally speaking Valve has a very good record and I'm always a bit sus about people claiming it is an awful thing for gaming. Apparently they don't remember what PC gaming was like before Steam.
Steam at this point has massive market power as a distributor. They must already have some sort of anti-malware policy they hold their suppliers to. If they wanted to, they could extend that policy to include intrusive anti-cheat malware, and the industry would change its ways overnight. Only the most powerful game companies could afford to forego Steam distribution. Steam 100% has the choice, and they choose to distribute this software.
The thing is they also happen to distribute their own multiplayer games that have been being hammered lately due to an influx of bots and cheaters. So on one side you have people arguing for the sanctity of their systems, and on the other side you have players who would like to enter at least one match where there isn't six snipers spinning around like washing machines
I don't game much these days, but my understanding from those who do is that multiplayer gaming could not exist without aggressive anti-cheat measures. Are you aware of less intrusive ways to keep the majority of players honest?
I'm not a game programmer, but I'd bet you could go far with better game technical design and architecture. My bank doesn't require me to run ring-0 spyware to prevent cheat software from changing my balance or viewing other people's balances. They correctly don't trust the client and don't send the client any more information than necessary.
But your bank also doesn't reward you for your situational-awareness skills, or give you a way to make even more money if you could somehow develop inhuman reflexes.
At least mine doesn't.
(Edit: to be fair, if I had been a little quicker on the draw when Schwab accidentally transferred $60+ million into my account several years ago, I might not be making this particular counterargument.)
not really, because you'd legally have to return that money anyways. your argument still holds.
a better counterargument would be that some banks don't allow their app to run on rooted phones, which is equivalent to anti-cheat measures (since windows is rooted by default)
> Steam is possibly one of the least worse monopolies that have existed. It doesn't block the products from being sold on other platforms, takes care of quite a lot for those who use it.
They do require that the price of your game on Steam be equivalent or lower than the price outside of it. That’s very anticompetitive, and IMO should be illegal as it doesn’t do anything but harm consumers.
> They do require that the price of your game on Steam be equivalent or lower than the price outside of it.
No, they don’t. As far as I know, there is nothing in the Distribution Agreement saying that and you can in fact regularly see games sold for less on GOG than Steam.
The only thing Valve disallows selling outside of Steam for less than on Steam are Steam keys.
I actually doubt it would be just 2-3. Already adding up the attempts of publishers comes to more than that. EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Activision-Blizzard, Microsoft, Take Two...
And then I remember the third party tries... All the MMORPGs. Pretty much everyone would have their own launcher and then there would bunch of smaller stores with their own platforms.
GOG is the way to go. Enough with the DRM BS. Is not only about ethical costs, all that people that invested thousands creating a huge library better pray Valve doesn't get into any trouble... or they get into any trouble with Valve. Buying and in the end, not owning anything doesn't look like buying at all!.
PS. I'm not angry with Valve because they use DRM in their platform, I'm angry with Valve because they don't give publishers the option to distribute their games using an offline, DRM free installer.
> because they don't give publishers the option to distribute their games using an offline, DRM free installer.
What does this mean? You can still publish your game through other channels if you publish through steam right? I mean there are games that are on Steam and other platforms.
I think he means that you can't have the thing you get when you buy from steam be an offline installer (though actually I think some older games are just this, or you can copy the installed files around afterwards; think running Morrowind with OpenMW).
Exactly. I don't get why people keep repeating the "but not all games are DRM" mantra. Everyone with a minimal experience in PC gaming knows that without a proper installer most of the time you'll be in trouble just by doing a game folder backup and restore afterwards. Not to mention as well that the DRM free games lists aren't supported in any way by Valve itself (Information about that in the game profile? A filter in the search page?), as they are simply a community effort.
Have to say I'm not anti-Valve at all, I appreciate their commitment to the PC platform and their contribution to the free source cause. I'm just very critical about lack of proper support of DRM-free options AND allowing people to not to depend on a working account after some product is supposedly purchased. DRM is the wrong answer to the wrong question aka how to stop people from doing something that current technology makes incredibly easy to do, instead of properly thinking about the real issue, how we keep fairly paying authors.
PS. Also I think that people should be a bit more concerned about data harvesting through the launcher.
It is. Allowing DRM seems to be a concession to publishers, since there is no real benefit for Valve. If anything it's a significant hindrance that is obstructing their effort to get as much Steam Deck support as possible. Windows-only DRM and anticheat are some of the worst offenders for breaking Proton compatibility.
The point is that Steam itself is DRM. Even if game itself can work standalone you can't install or update it without Steam client. This is the difference between Steam and GOG.
How is it different than having to use GOG's website to install a purchase you made or download an updated version?
Developers on Steam can ship their own update mechanism separate from Steam if they want to.
I feel like people don't actually know the policies of Steam and how it mostly just leaves it up to the developer, for better or worse.
If Steam decided to block developers from being able to do DRM, it wouldn't mean all the games would go DRM free, it'd mean the games wouldn't go on Steam, like they don't go on GOG - they'd go to their own launchers.
As much as people like to believe Steam has a monopoly, publishers have been able to bring out their own launchers reasonably successfully. People will go to their launchers if that's the only way to get anticipated games. Some of the most successful games started and remained outside of Steam.
The industry would look significantly different if Steam had an actual monopoly.
>How is it different than having to use GOG's website to install a purchase you made or download an updated version?
You buy game on GOG, dowload the installers, move it to a external HDD and you can install that game forever. This is the only thing that is actually DRM free.
Needless to say, you can't to that with ANY other store (be it Steam, Epic etc). All of them requires you to install their crap to access your bought games and they don't give you full offline installers.
> Needless to say, you can't to that with ANY other store (be it Steam, Epic etc). All of them requires you to install their crap to access your bought games and they don't give you full offline installers.
You don't get an installer but many games are DRM-free on Steam so you can just zip up the directory under steamapps/common and you're good to go. I have ~180 games on my storage HDD from Steam.
I always try to have an offline copy of every game i buy (and i try to buy them from "proper" DRM-free stores than Steam where possible) and while it'd be nice if there was an offline installer, it isn't really much of an issue in practice. The biggest issue with Steam is that you don't know if a game is DRM-free or not before buying it and trying to figure out yourself (which is why i prefer other stores like Zoom Platform and GOG in the first place).
When I hear this complaint it usually refers to games that provide certain features, multiplayer, rewards like skins, etc., only through the use of an online account.
I’m not saying those things aren’t worth complaining about, but frankly, they aren’t what come to mind when I think of problematic DRM in video games. What comes to mind is the inability to install and play a game without an internet connection. GOG still provides real installers, and remains the most prominent platform committed to it.
I think having an online account for multiplayer is a categorically different kind of requirement than having an online account for single player.
Until there’s a storefront that only sells games that include multiplayer servers that can be self‐hosted on your LAN, I think GOG’s explicit policy of no‐DRM installers is worth praising.
> Until there’s a storefront that only sells games that include multiplayer servers that can be self‐hosted on your LAN
IIRC from a discussion in their official Discord (by one of the people who work there) that is basically Zoom Platform[0]'s approach - if a game has a multiplayer component it has to allow you to run your own server.
Yes, that was mentioned in the thread I linked. According to the thread, both GOG and the game developer claimed it was a bug, and fixed it. This does not convince me of your statement that GOG has de facto eliminated its no‐DRM policy. A more plausible explanation is that GOG, not rolling in money like Steam, is subject to a certain amount of jank including high‐impact bugs that take longer than they should to get fixed. And GOG’s jankiness is a common complaint throughout these HN comments. I don’t think anyone contests that Valve provides a generally slick experience in comparison to its competitors.
> but their definition of optional includes "no multiplayer" as well.
I don't think this is ideal by any means, but I do think it's a reasonable compromise.
For better or worse, many/most modern multiplayer games are architected to use a centralized, company-run software. The server software is not built to be deployed by end-users, and getting it to that state would involve very significant engineering effort. It's just not a reasonable ask.
Steam also allows DRM free games, it's probably just not very popular with game developers.
One advantage of GoG is that they seem to actually care that old games on their store are actually working on new Windows versions, while on Steam it's more or less a gamble (at least you can return broken games though).
Like making me login again into Steam at random for whatever reason Valve come up with? I guess there was bug on older macOS where it asked me for password every single time I restarted Steam. Now this is fixed though. There is offline mode, but it's unreliable.
I know that some games might run without Steam, but it's not comfortable at all.
And yeah It's not a problem. It's just a difference between Steam and DRM-free platforms like GOG.
Even when it's working, eventually it stops working and you'll be forced to connect to the internet. I learned this the hard way once. When you're already dealing with the fact that you don't have internet access, having your access to your single player offline games taken from you is just cruel!
This is just false. As sibling comment mentioned Valve doesn't do third party exclusivity, but also the Steam DRM is completely optional and there are many games for which Steam just acts as a downloader and automatic update system. You can just copy these games' folder to another PC and run them without issue.
This seems like an extreme niche. What is the benefit of offline installers? Doomsday prepping? Because it’s certainly not more convenient than what Steam does, and Steam doesn’t require an internet connection to play games.
Steam is dropping support for Windows 7 and 8. If you don't switch OS, you'll lose the ability to install (and for most games with DRM, to play) the games you already purchased.
Steam doesn’t have a strict monopoly, but it is the most known and used.
Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales. If a game sells over $10 million then the cut is reduced to 25%
There is Epic Game Store: maker of Fortnite and Unreal Engine which also gives away 1 or 2 free games a week. It takes a 12% cut from developers selling through their store. Tencent, which has close ties to CCP, owns ~40% of Epic.
GOG “good old gamestore”owned by CD Projekt Red, the developers of the Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. Takes a 30% cut from sales. Also advocates for games without DRM.
EGS also dont have any proper user reviews to begin with. Its by design since Epic Games dont want even give players option to affect game sales. For instance compare how terrible broken The Last of Us Part 1 looks on Steam and EGS:
Some 3.8 star rating above and tons of praise from press below.
PS: As game developer I think competition is good. But as gamer I personally not gonna use Tencent/CCP Game Store since it's intentionally customer-hostile. This is not Steam competitor I want to support.
I used to care about this shit, but I don't any more. The experience with Steam is just that much more superior. Cloud saves that allow me to pick up my PC gaming session on my Steam Deck or MBP is something no other platform offers on the scale that Steam does. If I could buy a game on GOG or Steam, I will choose Steam every single time because of the platform benefits unless the GOG game allows a Steam redemption. To me this is the same argument as streaming video content. Steam offers enough content that I don't need to seek other services to supplement my gaming needs. This is very different from the video streaming services where content is so siloed into proprietary buckets.
They care about whatever Valve employees are interested in / is perceived as creating most value (not always the same as creating most value). Valve has a system of weighted peer feedback (impacting salary and sometimes continued employment) that encourages follow-the-leader mentality despite their supposedly open culture.
Though if you need an example: Steam still doesn't have M1 binaries. Steam uses about 15 variants of UI framework, and some of it simply doesn't work on some platforms. Steam also took record time shipping an x86_64 (over x86) binary back in the day. Everything that's not the shiny current thing receives life support at most.
I'm not sure I understand your example. What actual value would M1/aarch64 compiled steam binaries be? Practically all games available on their platform are made for x86 or x86-64. That doesn't seem like something Valve can change. The only reason gaming on Linux is becoming practical is because Vulkan support is maturing and Valve doubled down on getting windows binary compatibility.
I suppose Proton could probably be ported to OSX with enough work. Apple isn't making it easy by refusing to natively implement Vulkan, though. DirectX to Vulkan to Metal conversion on top of x86-64 emulation is just a lot going on. It seems like no one's interested in doing the work to convert DirectX directly to Metal.
Valve's insane corporate structure means its strategic moves are plain as day. They initially went on OSX because it made sense to leave no room for a competing game market to start on Mac and move to Windows.
They've invested massively on Linux and have attacked the problem from two angles in the last ten years because they need to diversify. They can't single-handedly rely on Microsoft for their continued existence. Hence the VR headsets, the Steam Machines, and now the Steam Deck.
They've put zero effort on macOS on Apple Silicon because they would gain nothing strategically, and the percentage of Mac users using Steam is small. The hardcore gamer on a Mac does not exist. We have consoles.
It's not insane for them to be transparent. When Valve depreciated Steam Play for MacOS, they had engineers very clearly spell out the reason: the MacOS runtime is not stable enough for games. They also called this out when depreciating SteamVR for MacOS, it seems less like a "strategic move" and more like a platform limitation.
There's definitely something for Valve to gain by porting Steam to MacOS, after all they did support MacOS with Proton originally. The work required to fix it for modern MacOS is monumental though, and unless Apple sponsors it I see no reason why it would happen. Once they axed 32-bit execution support on Mac, there was effectively no reason to keep supporting the platform anymore gaming-wise. OpenGL depreciations were the icing on the disappointment cake, very clearly Valve was being told to pound sand by Apple.
MoltenVK exists so that would take of Vulkan. Rosetta2 is super efficient, so I don’t see that as an impediment. The truth is, I don’t think Valve cares much about Macintosh. Blizzard doesn’t lately either. Oddly, the trend lines here are weird. MacOS is becoming the “get stuff done” platform, and Linux is becoming a gaming platform, both of which were previously Microsoft’s domain.
WoW64 support was added recently, so you shouldn't need a 32-bit Wine in the near future. This is because some Linux distros are also ditching multilib support on x86.
There are several games I play that are actually natively compiled for M1 (The Long Dark, Disco Elysium). Steam is a very noticeable resource hog on an M1, and I'd presume that's a mix of their UI framework mixing (CEF, VGUI) and lack of Apple Silicon binaries.
> That doesn't seem like something Valve can change.
This is where I'd disagree with you. Valve has all sorts of levers they could pull to encourage ARM builds. One example, they could offer a lower commission rate on games which have ARM builds available. This would incentivize developers to target the platform.
Why would Valve want to throw money at a platform that is as close to locking out third party app stores as Apple is?
Offering their client on Mac to those of their producers and consumers who are inherently motivated to use it but otherwise keeping a low profile there seems like just the right call to me.
Linux support was (is) a hedge against an OS vendor using their power to force themselves into the lucrative middle man position. MacOS support is not.
So if they have to subsidise your favourite platform, which apparently even Apple does not care about, or else they aren't "supporting" the platform, is that right?
If 70% of the sales price isn’t enough profit incentive, I kind of doubt that making that 80% would tip the scales to it being desirable to the game studio.
On M1 support. Apple been actively hostile to game developers. Apple has not maintained OpenGL support well, dropped 32-bit binaries, have no Vulkan support and break their APIs and compatibility all the time. No surprise Valve is not enthusiastic about supporting their platform.
There a lot of Mac software that been abandoned at some point in time due to API breakage on MacOS updates, driver API changes, etc. Supporting OS that breaks compatibility all the time is expansive even for less complex software and fixing games created on custom engines likely way too expensive.
After all you can install it in Parallels and play Windows versions just fine.
They care about making money. Their investments in Linux are their future insurance policy from Microsoft, as unlike Sony or Nintendo, Valve only own the storefront but not the platform on which their games would run, and with Windows being their biggest customer platform, makes their survival completely dependent on the mercy of Microsoft and the potential dystopian scenario where, for example, on Windows 12, 13 or 14 you'll only be able to install apps through the official Microsoft store.
Linux compatibility was their only ticket out. It's purely a business decision, not a benevolent one.
Not knocking them for it, but it's good to keep in mind the reality and not blindly worship a for-profit corporation.
Sure, but Valve has done a lot for the Linux gaming ecosystem.
It also goes deeper than just Linux, and
the Steam Deck is a perfect example of this. It's a real PC, and they allow you to use the device you bought as you wish.
Our incentives are aligned and due to how they operate it's likely that it'll stay that way for a long time.
As long as this is the case I will keep giving Valve my money and recommending their products to others.
Almost makes me happy that I have this (otherwise rather bad for, well, life) gaming habit, for allowing me to experience this rare case of capitalism working out rather nice (for two decades and counting).
Long-term self-interest is often indistinguishable from altruism. It is refreshing to see a company at least capable of that. That is as far as my blind worship goes ;)
Their interests align with my values. Being picky about the "why" of their interests especially when it is "they want to survive the crushing hand of Microsoft" is a rather rich criticism on your part.
Yeah companies want to survive economically. If they don't exist the products they make would be completely unavailable. It is a rather uninteresting angle to take.
While I can appreciate their dedication to Linux, I find their application process arbitrary and random, if not confusingly prejudiced towards certain types of games.
It's honestly a dice roll whether a visual novel will be accepted or rejected from Steam. Whatever reason used will weirdly not apply for titles already released and even titles that will apply after you. It doesn't matter if youre an indie game dev or Square Enix publishing a game set in the same universe as the widely loved Steins;Gate. You're still subject for a ban and for what really? Square Enix at least has the ability to talk behind the scenes to have the game approved.
This all matters so much because visual novels are already a niche. If you want to turn a profit you must sell on steam. This means that in response to an imprecise, contradictory policy it's in your best interest to self-censor as much as you can because you can not afford to have your game rejected.
Visual novels and similar games with young (looking) characters tend to get rejected for sexualizing those characters (rule 8). But there are also plenty of examples of tame games getting rejected, while similar but much more risque games were permitted, so it's hard to figure out exactly what Valve objects to.
But why? All the other launchers I have used are worse. Especially the EA launcher. It has been rewritten multiple times. When patching games it somehow requires a huge amount of extra disk space on top of installed game + 2*patch size.
So if they are the best, why shouldn’t have the largest market share?
> But people will choose the option even slightly more convenient for them against ethical costs.
Such is human nature. It actually takes mental effort/mind wrestling to justify for ourselves the healthier, less attractive choice.
Same is for our bodies and healthy foods, against something like a chocolate cake or pizza.
> I wish steam didn't have an effective monopoly on PC video game distribution.
Back on topic, any other dominant actor in the market could have been the one affected by this moderation misjudgement. Let's suppose Origin was this dominant actor and this faux pas happened to them. This post would have been about Origin.
Note: I chose to say "dominant actor" instead of "effective monopolist" because other market actors are present, even if much less powerful.
They are competing with Epic, CD Project, Microsoft, Apple on macOS plus all the editors store and physical media. They are dominant but very far from being a monopoly.
I use gog.com, come to think of it it's the only thing I have any sort of brand loyalty for. They seem to genuinely care. I use steam if it's not on gog though.
Not anymore. Or hardly anymore. Often these contain a barely working game if at all, but might even just contain a download code for steam, origin etc.
And then there are a lot of games that release exclusively on steam. Oxygen not included comes to mind.
Did they finally fix the problem on Windows Store that large game downloads simply don't work? I actually thought they just gave up when the Microsoft 1st party games started showing up on Steam.
Monopolies and DRM is always bad but I still appreciate the fact Steam is the least bad implementation of such evil I've ever seen. Other DRM platforms are infinitely worse.
Also, Steam provides a good service. There's a reason people don't remember the old days where you had to download and apply several 500 MB incremental patches on unreliable connections just to play an online game.
To be honest Steam was one of the best working monopolies out of the perspective of end-users.
All you needed once to play games on Linux was Steam.
Now we have a few more relevant competing game stores and you need a whole bunch of awful launchers.
I'm not saying the monopoly was a great thing for publishers though! That's a completely different story.
But for end-users it was "the one and only app store for games you ever need". This was even better than mostly everything else regarding Linux software. Steam was once like Napster. You've just got everything there. No we have the same situation like with the dozens of movie streaming providers: If you want access to everything you need accounts everywhere. That's a clear step backwards for the consumers.
If only something like Steam or movie streaming could be one globally distributed open service… Than such a "monopoly" would be the greatest thing for customers since Napster.
Steam can do with some competition but all their competition is terrible. Chrome's competitors at least work similarly and well enough. Google would have a browser monopoly if all of their competition were as laggy and featureless as Steam's main competitors are.
GOG comes closest to being good but I find their launcher to be quite buggy and slow. Origin, uPlay, Epic Games, those are all terrible in comparison to Steam. The Steam UI is far from amazing, but it's leagues ahead of the competition in terms of usability in my experience.
If you don't like Steam, you can buy your games elsewhere. GOG and Epic exist and together they have most games that aren't Steam exclusives. Xbox Game Pass has some pretty good deals on games too (which includes some PC titles). There are thousands of games to be played without ever having to download Steam if you choose to.
Is your history off or was I always misguided? I thought Steam effectively launched such HL2 which included the release of CSS. CSS is what required it rather than 1.6, no?
CS 1.6 definitely required it. 1.5 was the last version of CS on WON. It was the flagship game to have Steam for until Half-Life 2. And yes, CS:S also required it.
> Is it always unethical to buy something supplied by a monopoly?
Never, it's just unethical to operate one.
> Is convenience an ethical good
I feel like this could only be true if your life was in actual danger when lacking that convenience. This is possibly the wrong question anyways, I'd ask if the externalized costs of that convenience are small enough to justify the imputed good of the service.
Which is why we can tolerate natural monopolies where collective safety is involved, such as electrical distribution, but shouldn't where it isn't, such as video game distribution.
> especially convenience delivered on a mass scale?
What special ethical properties does this provide?
The issue isn't having a monopoly (which Steam doesn't) but rather doing anti-competitive things to maintain the monopoly.
Having a good product that people want and prefer to buy isn't anti-competitive. Establishing exclusive contracts with publishers and preventing something from being sold somewhere else for less is anti-competitive.
I don't find it reasonable to claim that Steam is a monopoly in the PC gaming space (there might be an argument for it if one were to try to limit it to "games distribution platforms that run on Linux"). And even assuming that they did have a monopoly, they aren't using anti-competitive techniques to maintain it.
There is a statement further up in the comment tree that states ".. it's just unethical to operate [a monopoly]."
I'm trying to clarify that it's not unethical to have a monopoly, nor even maintain one - it is only unethical to maintain one in ways that are anticompetitive (and making the best product isn't anticompetitive).
Convenience is an ethical good because it saves either time, energy, or thought, all of which are limited resources.
If a monopoly makes something more convenient for hundreds of millions of people, think of the species-wide savings.
Add up all conveniences, and you get real progress. For instance, many women in Africa are in charge of providing water and clean laundry for their households - not agreeing, just stating the facts. These two things are almost a full-time job if done by hand.
If things ever progressed to the point where African countries have mass-scale running water and washing machines, think of how hundreds of millions of adults suddenly have time and energy to do something else.
Now that's an extreme example, but the point stands. Making things convenient for others requires hard work upfront building systems and is to be encouraged.
steam doesn't have a monopoly on pc video game distribution. There are many other services - GoG, epic, microsoft, etc. Steam is just the best of those services, by a long shot, and was far earlier and is better in almost all respects.
I kinda get it, but what is the practical difference between that and re-renting the game 17 years later? In both scenarios you depend on the game still being available. (the buy model make it easier to keep the game around on some disk for 17 years ofc.)
Accounting and exclusivity. MS can try to make GamePass a gate for all future purchases, and the interchange cost is just moving money around inside MS at that point.
Because it goes from a hope to a rule. No need to hope that Diablo IV will be free on Gamepass, day 1 (and let's be serious, if ActiBlizz stays independent there is no hope in hell for this to happen) - but if the sale goes through then this will be reality.
Imagine Diablo IV or each of the Call of Duties... free... day 1. That is huge value. Something Steam can't compete with.
It's mild compared to other punishments, but severe for the action of voting on a review
For me the salient factor is what this is a rare occurrence. If you operate at scale you're going to occasionally do the wrong thing. Is this one wrong incident, or the tip of the iceberg? I don't see any reason to get the pitchforks out just yet.
I think you could sum up the entire discussion about anti-cheat sort of like this: We're currently at a point where game publishers expect to be able to install rootkits on their customers's PCs. This is seen as basically an industry standard security practice and general requirement for publishing.
I think it's not quite unlike the situation with DRM in movies or ads and tracking on the web. In too many parts of tech, hostile behaviour has been normalised as "standard business practices".
The problem I see with anti-cheat technology is that editors are also forcing these rootkits on games that can be played solo (either solo exclusively or multiplayer games with solo campaigns).
While I can fully understand being forced to run anti-cheat technology on my PC to play online games, I find it totally unacceptable and unethical to have this kind of software forced upon me for games I exclusively play solo.
I consider myself lucky to not need to worry at all about the financial cost of my hobby, I value gaming so much that I would even pay double for some of the games I played. But installing a rootkit on my PC is out of the question. Personally, until editors accept to treat their honest customers as honest customers (at least the solo players), I will not behave "honestly" and will keep using "alternative" ways to acquire games.
While I'm with you on being against dark patterns and unethical behavior, anti-cheat feels different in that it seems pretty honestly an effort to make the game better for players (the non cheaters, at least). I haven't seen any arguments that anti-cheat is being used in the interests of the company over the user, it's all that people don't like the technology that's required to do this. So I think it's pretty different from DRM which is pretty clearly an interest misalignment.
At the day yes no one likes this software, but people like gaming with cheaters even less. Just like how we don't like being subject to social media moderation, but we dislike spam even more. I think we can't rule out that these companies (in these instances) are trying to give us what we want even if the means are a bit unseemly.
I don’t believe that what Valve is doing here, deleting a negative customer review of a good or service for sale, is even allowed under the EU e-Commerce directive.
I don’t think that the anti cheat was doing anything shady. It’s pretty much industry standard to have the anticheat start from the registry and run in the background as a service. While I’m not advocating the general shadiness of anticheat software this doesn’t stand out as a particularly interesting case. Valorant is a great example once installed their anticheat is so pervasive I wouldn’t be surprised if a full OS reinstall didn’t wipe it. Then there is fortnite who advertises to use easy’s anti cheat solution on their splash screen (and they do) but then have multiple obfuscated and hidden running processes made by battleeye. Battle eye not only hides itself from the screen ask manager it also installs as a separate package which doesn’t uninstall with fortnite. I mean the games are free and very fun so it’s hard to be mad. I just heavily segregate my gaming pc from anything else on my network . I never browse the web on it or do anything but game and that makes me feel 1% better about the Orwellian nightmare of spy software sitting within it.
Have you considered using Nvidia Geforce Now? I switched to it when Fortnite became unavailable on Macs and I'll never go back to a physical gaming rig. It works so well, and there are no fans screaming. But not every game is available on it.
I've often wondered about escrow for cheat detection.
I'll put $10, $100, $1000 up to enter the player pool at that X level. If someone catches me cheating and can provide evidence via game replays then they can submit it to a group that reviews and then the money is awarded to them.
No bans, if I want to play again then I have to pay again or go back to the public level.
In my experience, it's always the free product/game/saas tiers that have the abuse. Money is a great curb on bad behavior. Not perfect, but drastically reduces the pool of bad actors.
Counterstrike through the ages used to be a paid product. After a ban your whole account was locked down, so in a practical sense it used to always have a 20-50 “escrow” fee to join the pool of legitimate players. Even today the cs:go “prime” status does a similar thing.
It doesn’t seem to affect the number of cheaters in any way, if anything it leads to incentives of account stealing and underground exchanges of steam acc/keys.
Personally I feel the cheating issue is more of a side effect of games moving away from dedicated servers with communities and towards global matchmaking. There used to be well run servers that would quickly kick-ban cheating players and have a social construct that incentivizes playing nice to keep access to the good servers.
Not that practical today with all the battle royals and as with any “government” there is abuse and corruption, it wasn’t perfect but I do miss the days of servers that always had a admin online to shutdown cheaters and rules around minimum pings and bare-minimum sportsmanship in the voice chat.
I think the community servers solution wouldn't have scaled up to current markets. Back in the day with smaller userbases you'd have less casual players, more people who would be interested in administrating a server and willing to work for free. Now that gaming is mainstream and everyone does it, not everyone cares as much as people used to back then.
Counter-Strike itself still has community servers as an option. And given the choice between those servers and regular matchmaking, most players prefer the latter. This map hasn't updated in 4 years, but I doubt that has changed: https://teamwork.tf/worldmap/csgo/live
Setting a $500 entry fee would quickly shrink the global pool to about the size of a dedicated server. Not that local server wouldn't still be an option as well if someone (or a group) wanted to run it.
For people that just walk into the game though, I wouldn't mind paying to instantly have a well-curated global community without having to vet each server trying to find the good ones. Again though, for kids with more time I think there is room for both.
This is a great use case for programmable money. A smart contract on a blockchain such as an Ethereum layer 2 chain could handle this openly and verifiably.
"Restrict" is a 100% true description of what happened, there isn't the tiniest bit wrong about it. It's just your (our, I was afflicted by it myself) expectation that harsher measures are sugarcoated by deliberately inaccurate PR language. We can't blame the headline for our implicit expectation of incorrectness and neither can we blame the company responsible for a perceived lack of PR lies.
This reminds me of a similar incident with the Apple App Store, there were so many negative reviews that rather than Apple forcing the developer to fix the issue, they just deleted all the negative reviews.
I agree with the author, this makes the entire Valve review system pointless.
To play devils advocate, I'm sure the far more common case at Apple when thousands of negative reviews roll in very quickly is that some unscrupulous competitor paid a bot farm to knee cap them. Normally the anomaly detection goes off and the fake reviews are filtered.
On very rare occasion, someone somewhere will get a message from a Nigerian prince which they dismiss as spam because it looked just like all those other cases which were in fact spam. oops.
I look at the one star ones. If their complaints look reasonable and consistent then I know it is crap.
The only reviews to trust are from consumer reports and which? Who buy things retail and not free from the manufactures and they have been doing this for 60 years. Even then Read the reviews carefully and the user comments.
That’s a good point. I’m extraordinarily lazy about security. Maybe you could make one browser profile to look up products, and your usual one to buy them.
It's about the process. Amazon did not incomparable a versioning for the goods they sell. It's also not feasible to have a versioning for goods, as there are old versions still in the selling.
So, what solution do you propose for Amazon, the sellers and the producers?
Having the bad history visible is not a solution, as that product won't be sold anymore after..
The output from this incident doesn't seem useful for anyone tbh.
-Just deleting the comment isn't right. But it was up for a long time so saying this renders the comment system useless isn't true. Snuffing out speech at inception would be infinitely worse from ethics and pragmatic standpoints.
-"2500 accounts banned" here means just related to that specific game's community, temporarily. Chances are a dozen or fewer of those might have even noticed that trying to contribute to that specific niche forum in normal situation.
-Comments on the anti-cheat seem just FUD. It seems to run like any other anti-cheat, leaving stuff in registry is what almost any software does even after uninstalled. And it doesn't seem to have run unless the games' active besides due to a bug during beta. At worst the "hope they change to a more reputable anti-cheat vendor" kind of talk runs towards a situation where one ("the"?) big vendor's anti-cheat software (which is a rootkit from a permissions standpoint) gets so juicy a target it gets hacked and million gamers get their PC bricked at worst.
If we wanted useful talk on anti-cheat it should first target things like Riot's Vanguard. Other developers don't need their anti-cheat to run as deep which, if something should cause some stress in PC users by default. This also kills Riot's game's accessibility on linux to the cradle, which should not be considered to only to harm Riot's business.
Some also noted it as a negative that the anti-cheat has a tray icon. Developer starts to debate if the software should even have one if it just causes users to FUD themselves instead or increasing feeling of trust and control.
I wonder what would be the right way to handle this without resorting to pointless rigamaroles. Maybe some kind of pre-comment disclaimer from valve administrator to the comment after a short investigation to the anti-cheat solution clearing the FUD (if it was grossly breaking GDPR or such I don't think the game or the company could stay up long)
People's computers are used for everything from doing everything from earning money, banking, managing their life, their money, their future. Video games by contrast are about as important as a flea on your dogs ass. It is profoundly weird to put the former at even slight risk for the latter. The fact that we are attempting to normalize this doesn't make it normal or sane.
Running always on software when the game isn't running and talking to resources on the internet is incredibly suspicious. The presence of the tray icon isn't causing users to "FUD" themselves. It is rather making this suspicious behavior—running continually—more obvious. The fact that you seem to think its just ordinary stupidity like leaving crap littered around your filesystem doesn't make it less concerning. People wouldn't be fishing around for traces of it to eliminate like purging a piece of malware if it weren't already acting like malware. If it was initially due to a bug that would be a fine time to communicate with users.
The right way to handle this is to say sorry we screwed up we wont punish people for liking a review in the future. If any aspect of the review is inaccurate the logical response is to have valve or the dev respond to this. If it really really doesn't belong you remove it. There is no scenario where you randomly ban people from reviewing it for voting the wrong way.
> if it was grossly breaking GDPR or such I don't think the game or the company could stay up long
How exactly do you propose that would happen? How would people learn their rights are being violated?
Lastly this is your only comment on this site and it seems to be a tad slanted. Do you work for a party involved in this?
I agree that security on PC's isn't as mature as it should be. There just should not be a case that Riot running a kernel-mode driver -based anticheat just for _their_ games. Hell, I was ready to flame about it not working with virtualization enabled in BIOS as I installed Valorant a few days ago, but it actually does. Still kind of pissed to have to run it in the background (this one actually runs even when not running Riot's games btw, unlike the one in the article!) Though I don't see a situation where one would need to "root" their PC just to run custom software a good situation either.
>Running always-on software when the game isn't running and talking to resources on the internet is incredibly suspicious.
From what I read (actually reading a few articles longer than the general observer does while filling their FUD meter) the anticheat simply doesn't run unless the game itself is running. Which makes it comparable to just being a library contained in the game executable, but separate for whatever technical reasons. Note that Vanguard for example isn't as nice.
I did not mention that leaving tons of crap in the filesystem is normal. I mentioned registry which seems to be more prone to spam. As a developer I think there should be some reasonable "scoping" in installs to limit this, leaving it for every developer to do more painstakingly just ends up in the littery situation, which I do not prefer but just mention to be the status quo. Hell, if I was in position to design something on system-level, I would just force apps to declare:
-paths it writes to
-registry keys it writes to
-devices like webcam and other abilities it accesses while at it, like on mobiles
This would then be read by installer/uninstaller and user could choose to keep this data or remove it when installing/removing software. Could also prevent writing outside of these as a general rule (unless some dev mode or similar is activated of course)
About the tray icon, my point is that the situation with it ends up being kind of like an armed guard visibly carrying a weapon causing more harm in fear, and the result being them just hiding the weapons, which of course is not a dynamic that should exist. Things being done visibly should be the thing every developer by default would choose but at worst with this dynamic they will feel the need to hide things to avoid the potential FUD. This can cause behavior that is not beneficial to the user but is actually done to alleviate fear. Kind of like disabling developer stuff in games (because user will break their game and complain or some shit) which I have several times successfully argued against.
>The right way to handle this is to say sorry we screwed up we wont punish people for liking a review in the future.
Is more useful to think about how this could have been avoided and how this could be avoided in the future.
If the deletion wouldn't been done yet, I agree that some kind of joint message could be the best. Maybe in the format:
<start of review section>
<NameOfUserWhoDidTheScaryReview><Time/Date>
<Header box>
<Text like: X developer regrets the angst caused. Valve investigated these claims. No foul play is apparent. Companion software does not run outside of the game's run time. However note that anti-cheat measures by their nature go beyond the game executable itself, while not sending unnecessary PII.>
<original review text>
<other reviews>
<end of review section>
Probably the reason this ended up in just deletion of the comment is a clusterfuck of inability to communicate or spend time on developer-user-platform owner communications only after something becomes a PR nightmare.
I commented because it is a bit sad that the blame / output of this situation simply isn't constructive (does not cause awareness / pressure for things to actually to go in a better direction).
In a way I see parallels to when Anthem was released and there was shock articles of the game "bricking your ps4!" when I reasonably confidently know the issue was caused just by ps4's bad SDK design which easily causes filesystem-corrupting bugs when doing the simplest of savegames. This then caused a chkdsk-type popup and a crazy dangerous-sounding SFX on the ps4's next boot but didn't seem to cause any actual damage, outside of probably losing the specific savegames from what I collected.
But no constructive discussion in to that direction (how to not design your console OS/SDK) was seen anywhere in relation to that news item.
>Lastly this is your only comment on this site and it seems to be a tad slanted. Do you work for a party involved in this?
Fair note, but I do have reason for my tone. No I am not involved. But am a developer with too much free time currently who has worked with multiple kinds of similar stuff so I feel the reason to lament as the discussion around this seems off center.
I tend to be a heavy lurker on sites I frequent, HN being one. I've visited HN probably every day for several years, mostly without an account. But when I write a comment it tends up taking so much focus I avoid internet arguments as a rule. But sometimes I make an exception like now.
AVOID omega double thumbs DOWN
This game installs some random low reputation anti cheat from japan that I have noticed some very strange behaviors from.
First it maintains running even when the game is closed, including tray icons. Also it starts on boot up regardless of boot up settings.
It seems to be sending some packets of data to japan IPs while the game has already been closed.
If you made the mistake of installing this very suspicious application it took me some time to discover all the traces of it on my PC but I believe I have completely removed it.
first uninstall the warlanders game from steam. Check to make sure that C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat is gone, not just empty
open a commandline and run C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat\setray.exe --unins2 just to make sure
search your whole PC for ses.exe and setray.exe. Delete any traces that occur
Then go here: C:\Users(put your username here)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Sentry Anti-Cheat Notification.lnk <- delete that
finally I searched quite a bit in the registry and mostly everything in the registry is gone relating to this AC. However there still is an entry so get rid of that
Win+R button
type regedit.exe
then navigate to this section:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SentryAntiCheat <- right click that and press remove then confirm
(From https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198128363815/recomm..., where they failed to purge it from the page source.)