The Steam client is like a virus or a parasite. You can't start a game without also starting Steam. It's the worst piece-of-shit software that I know outside of actual viruses.

Except that it is actually useful and pioneered a bunch of user friendly features that no one else bothered to implement.

It's not up to them to decide what user want.

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.

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.

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.

> buy games from GOG

I wish I could agree, but nope, noooo.

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.

> so long as you backed up the installers

But assuming you don't, because it would take a huge amount of space, games are lost when you lose your account on GOG as well.

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.

Steamwebhelper.exe routinely consumes 100+ MB of memory

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.

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.

And it's usually not optional.

Ok but that's a very different problem to what you said about not being able to launch a game without launching steam.

> And it's usually not optional.

That's not Steam's fault.

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.

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.

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.

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).

This only works for a tiny numbers of games if the Steam client is not installed.

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.

The problem is that most games are only available on Steam.

Most steam games use the steam api, and do something along the lines of: If steam not running, show error popup.

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 and then cause weird bugs far into the game.

Somehow when I buy games on GOG I never have to worry about this.

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.

Problem is that anti cheat essentially is malware and it can’t function as anti cheat inside of a sandbox.

But it would be nice if any single player game was sandboxed.

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.

Anti cheat is also necessary if you design your game around micropayments I assume, so not purely a multiplayer issue.

I am ok with that market dying in a fire admittedly..

Not necessarily.

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.

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 was required for multiplayer.

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.

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.

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 play on consoles now, and the fact that there are no cheaters is probably half the reasons why

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/

That thing might help you with recoil, but it doesn’t see through walls and auto aim.

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.

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.

"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.

Anti-cheat can't fix bad management.

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.

Basically SGX.

The alternative is doing cheat detection entirely server-side.

How do I detect you using an aim hack without seeing your machine?

Have you ever spectated another player and quickly realized whether they were using an aim hack? How did you know?

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.

Why do you think having access to the machine would help against computer vision and input emulators?

The alternative is reviewing the logs of people who constantly get kicked for cheating and ban them.

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 didn't really work, people will gladly spend obscene amounts of money for an unfair advantage and/or to ruin other players' fun.

This creates a perverse incentive for the cheat detection system to have a lot of false positives.

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.

In the end you're getting full fledged binary which can run anything on your system.

Also I'm not sure if sandboxing on Windows even exists.

it does, Chrome and Firefox uses it

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/d...

it's not as simple as unshare() for namespaces on Linux, but works pretty well

This is a chromium feature, not a windows one.

> This is a chromium feature, not a windows one.

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

In addition to just taking all privileges way from the process, like Chrome does, there's also Sandboxie [1] and the official Windows Sandbox [2]

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...

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.

Yep - dream device is a phone that runs android+ios under strict supervision

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.

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.

0: https://hackaday.com/2022/08/29/genshin-security-impact/

1: https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-eternals-first-update-includes-...

Cheating in online games is enough to make multiplayer unplayable if it becomes rampant enough, which as a game developer you care about. One example:

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

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.

Unfortunately, windows doesn’t really have sandboxed processes ubiquitously available.

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.

This is false. UWP is literally a sandbox. And Windows also supports containerization.

Most apps aren’t UWP, therefore not ubiquitous.

macOS takes a much more hardline approach to this, which is what’s needed.

Windows containers are crapshot. Unlike linux containers you must match the exact kernel version. And GPU acceleration is iffy, which is important for games.

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)