Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review

Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by baobabKoodaa on Saturday June 19, 2021 @11:02AM (#27561013)

I can't wrap my head around this one either. Yes, Steam UX is horrible, every action takes 2 seconds to complete, even opening the home page takes 2 seconds when Steam is already running. They haven't even bothered to put up a loading spinner, it's just a black screen. And yet, somehow, Epic is even worse. Doing anything in Epic you have to look at black screen for like 5-10 seconds, and you never know when it has crashed versus when it's eventually going to finish doing whatever thing it was doing for 10 seconds.

But the absolute worst thing about Epic Games Store is that it steals 5% of my CPU cycles whenever it's running. That's right, when I'm playing a game I purchased on Epic, the game runs 5% worse (assuming it's CPU bottlenecked) because Epic Games Store needs 5% of my CPU to do nothing, all the time.

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by smoldesu on Saturday June 19, 2021 @01:31PM (#27562447)

Check out Legendary[0] as an alternative to the default Epic games launcher. If you're comfortable with the command line, it will stay completely out of your way, forever.

[0] https://github.com/derrod/legendary

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by iamcreasy on Saturday June 19, 2021 @04:29PM (#27564173)

Wow, this is really cool. Is there anything similar for Steam?

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by fragileone on Saturday June 19, 2021 @05:18PM (#27564541)

https://github.com/dmadisetti/steam-tui is one and it's built in Rust.

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by smoldesu on Saturday June 19, 2021 @05:41PM (#27564713)

Holy shit, thank you for sharing! I've never seen that one before, but it might be the final element I need to put together a no-DE laptop... well, if those Discord TUIs hadn't died off :(

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by manigandham on Saturday June 19, 2021 @11:47AM (#27561500)

These stores and games now include some pretty invasive DRM and anti-cheat software. That's probably what's causing the CPU usage.

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by baobabKoodaa on Saturday June 19, 2021 @11:52AM (#27561552)

Ok, I'll bite. Why does the DRM and anti-cheat software need to run while a game is not running?

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by raptorfactor on Saturday June 19, 2021 @05:41PM (#27564711)

Because if I can just load my own driver before you load your anti-cheat driver it significantly lowers the difficulty of defeating the anti-cheat. Whoever gets into ring0 (or below) first usually 'wins'.

So for example Valorant's anti-cheat leverages a hypervisor which is always-on, and then an additional client which runs when you launch the game.

The situation is similar with the ESEA counter-strike client.

I just refuse to play games with measures like that. Especially given the fact ESEA got caught deploying a bitcoin miner with their client.

These games always have cheaters anyway, so what am I giving up all that privacy and security for?

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by judge2020 on Saturday June 19, 2021 @10:05PM (#27566434)

The difference is that the price of developing cheats goes up when you need to defeat these measures, and when that happens it means fewer players in the 'cheat for sale' market. There will still be cheaters but much less doing it just for competitive play online. At that point the developer can just learn your business and go after you legally, like Activision has been doing for the past 10 or so years[0,1].

0: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-30-prominent-chea...

1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160705/09363534897/check...

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by baobabKoodaa on Sunday June 20, 2021 @01:53AM (#27567502)

> Because if I can just load my own driver before you load your anti-cheat driver it significantly lowers the difficulty of defeating the anti-cheat. Whoever gets into ring0 (or below) first usually 'wins'.

This is entirely unrelated to Epic Games Store wasting 5% of my CPU when it's running. I can just load my own driver before I launch the Epic Games Store.

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by manigandham on Sunday June 20, 2021 @10:09AM (#27570132)

It could also just be a bug in the launcher: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-bug-in-the-epic-games-store-launch...

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by nichch on Saturday June 19, 2021 @12:05PM (#27561674)

Epic has no DRM. Steam’s “DRM” is non intrusive and optional. The EGS is a CEF application and is probably less resource efficient than it should be.

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Re:Steam required additional 57.51 GB download for a review by hexo on Saturday June 19, 2021 @01:13PM (#27562286)

thankfully they didnt put up a loading spinner. i would explode. :D

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