Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful
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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.)
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Edit: found it, here it is:
https://old.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/7yh4zu/deleted_b...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/flight-sim-labs-fights-piracy-by-...
> These idiots sent the passwords over HTTP to a machine running RDP on the public internet!! WTF, this stupidity has to be criminal!
Can't make this shit up.
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'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.
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.
Wall hacking and aim bot can be caught with behavior and statistics. Not in real-time but damn near.
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.
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.
You can see that gear is hacked items. Invalid stuff.
Nothing is ever done about it. Absurdly blatant, and discouraging.
I’ve made top 10 on hardcore at early portions of a new season before. But only before these regulars get online and instantly get to the top.
That, or any other of many scenarios that go against the idea that an account is used by one and only one person.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlIXK2L_180 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRmU91YJFo4
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And of course besides that, games with local multiplayer.
What's the max latency that is low enough?
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.
.... 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.
Once upon a time Microsoft wasn't afraid to stand up to corporate-sponsored malware. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-will-wipe-sonys-root...
I guess that's changed?
I seriously doubt any anti-malware software will block this.
Microsoft has jumped the shark. Stop giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Let the developers (well... managers) deal with the refunds then.
> software is designed to own your machine, take away your control and monitor you
This is not really a problem with anti cheat
Don't generalize that to all software. Free software doesn't do that. GNU was literally founded on the principle of not doing that.
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/7yh4zu/deleted_b...
Flight simulator software developer ships malware to users, exfiltrates browser's password store to their servers without even using encryption.
HOWEVER, it and the user mode component are run on demand.
The issue here is sending data all the time and being balls deep in your Windows install even after removing the game
Similarly, IMO it feels shoddy when Steam acts as a "launcher for another launcher" when starting a game.
But it would be nice if any single player game was sandboxed.
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.
I am ok with that market dying in a fire admittedly..
Usually when micro-transactions are present everything is validated server side, Leading to always online games like diablo 3+.
From my understanding kernel level anticheat is to detect things like aimbot, wallhack etc.
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.
() technically a lot of games have anti-piracy measures that are somewhat active, but they're rarely of the "phone home" variety
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.
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'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.
There are definitely fewer cheaters overall on console but there are more than you may think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC1dcQqCqFc / https://www.cronusmax.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anti-cheat can't fix bad management.
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.
Something Awful did this with their forum and it does a pretty good job at keeping spammers and other irritants out.
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.
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.
Also I'm not sure if sandboxing on Windows even exists.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/d...
it's not as simple as unshare() for namespaces on Linux, but works pretty well
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
1: https://github.com/sandboxie-plus/Sandboxie
2: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...
2b: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
0: https://hackaday.com/2022/08/29/genshin-security-impact/
1: https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-eternals-first-update-includes-...
https://www.ign.com/articles/team-fortress-2-players-protest...
So having some form of preventing cheating is important. Doing it right is tricky I guess
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.
There is https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...
However it isn’t available in the Home release.
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.
macOS takes a much more hardline approach to this, which is what’s needed for things like this.
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...
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/6980058...
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".
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 frequently see people here justifying chrome over Firefox due to a really small feature relative to maintaining a healthier web.
Is it always unethical to buy something supplied by a monopoly?
Is convenience an ethical good, especially convenience delivered on a mass scale?
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?
Is it? If you simply have no competition, you're running a monopoly. That doesn't seem like an unethical situation.
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.
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).
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.
It was basically forced on us when CS 1.6 required it.
Reality is almost everyone abandoned PC gaming for a decade+ in favour of consoles.
Valve and steam were the only real player, which is why they're in the position they're in.
I took an shining to GOG, but the the Linux situation just reaffirmed how I buy my games.
I never used Steam, nor plan to.
There isn't time to play everything.
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.
Also, if I need to choose my monopoly, I'll take Valve over Microsoft.
Imagine Diablo IV or each of the Call of Duties... free... day 1. That is huge value. Something Steam can't compete with.
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.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
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!
I'm buying games exclusively on GoG because DRM free policy.
Their docs do admittedly ask devs to make integration optional for the user, 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.
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).
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.
To get a sense of what people are referring to as DRM on GOG, I reference this thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep...
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.
There was enough complaining about that that it got fixed, I believe, but that's how they released it.
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.
Is steam's backup/restore game files option much different in practice?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
GoG ostensibly cared about Linux in the beginning, but by now it's very clear that they don't.
It's their choice of course, and among all the alternatives to Steam I guess they're the best choice.
But they obviously don't want me as a customer, so I largely ignore them and don't recommend them to anyone.
In almost every single aspect, Steam is just the superior product.
Yes they do. There are plenty of DRM free games on Steam. DRM is optional on Steam.
People Make Games made an enlightening documentary on the Valve model and where it fails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
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.
After all you can install it in Parallels and play Windows versions just fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed the Mac support is lackluster, but it's yet another proprietary platform and Apple makes it difficult to work on.
Steam doesn't need more than 2/4GB so it doesn't seem like that matters.
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.
Microsoft has that in certain areas, like Typescript. Not so much anything related to Windows.
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.
They don't care what devices you use to play the games you bought on Steam since you're still tied to their platform.
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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
"Commoditize your complements."
In general you open source / lower price (to free if possible) your complements.
Pretty much all companies do this.
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.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/onboarding...
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.
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.
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888930/The_Last_of_Us_Pa...
Reviews are mixed above and a lot of negative reviews from players below.
> https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/the-last-of-us-part-1
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.
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.
So if they are the best, why shouldn’t have the largest market share?
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 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.
and it invests into wine development to make windows games run on linux.
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)
to protect against what though?
Keyloggers (touchloggers?), I imagine.
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.
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.
Realistically, the alternative without Steam would not be dozens of stores, but (eventually) 2-3 stores, that would all behave much worse than Steam.
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.
Plus unlike Electronic Arts, Valve doesn't delete games I've bought from my library.
And yet the PC is the only platform left where the user even has a choice in the matter.
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.
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.
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.
I have few, if any, problems with Steam.
That'd be CSS, not 1.6.
In my opinion that's rather mild restriction and I'm wondering how come this surfaced with such, IMO limited, impact.
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.
Since the review was removed as spam, if it actually was that would mean there's a good chance of the accounted upcoming it being compromised or fake.
It happened to some other users after a review changed text completely I think.
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".
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.
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.
Edit: sure looks like it: https://www.loganpartners.com/legal-aspects-of-customer-revi...
The studio got sued and Valve removed their game from Stream a few weeks ago.
They then made a torrent and spread it through discord yesterday.
But discord does not allow torrents to be posted, so now discord redirects to twitter.
When the legal system turns against you, technology used by criminals become the only last resort.
If Elon saw this he would announce the twitter app store in seconds. XD
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.
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.
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.
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
Misleading reviews are basically definition of fraud and wont make game any better.
So, restricted.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...
I agree with the author, this makes the entire Valve review system pointless.
... also involves what is currently happening now, the Developer is reaching out to Valve to investigate the apparent mistake by the Moderator.
The system is still working on it.
Question I have is, why does the system allow banning 2500 people so easily? without auditing?
In what universe is that an acceptable reason?
(Couldn't resist)
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..
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.
Everything is 4.5ish stars, and the worse products have more fake reviews to get there.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-...
I think I'll dread the day Gabe steps down.
Valve's response has not been ideal, but punishment before investigation isn't any better.
But now I'm not going to participate at all, for fear of losing access to all of my games. I'm sure many others will do the same.
I wonder if it was worth it.
-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)
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?
>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.
it is also possible that the support ticket response is an automated one and not written after manual review.