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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

Steam is possibly one of the least worse monopolies that have existed

and it invests into wine development to make windows games run on linux.

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.

What choice do they have?

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.)

to be fair...

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?

to protect against what though?

Keyloggers (touchloggers?), I imagine.

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