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[Punished Miku]

As a dev myself I cant agree with that.
No legit dev would have a problem to go through such processes - after all there is TRC´s on consoles too that have to be followed if one wants to release on there.
But Steam is the largest platform on PC, you simply cannot ignore it, and without any processes demanded by Valve its basically the wild west.


Of course they dont, they take 30% of our profit and no dev is happy about that:

Just 6% of devs say Steam earns its 30% cut - Survey

For years, Valve has thrived by taking a 30% cut of all revenues developers bring in through Steam, but the company is …

www.gamesindustry.biz

They could do ALOT more, but they simply refuse to!

Well look at what EPIC did. Lowered the cut they take. Free games meaning they're cutting people checks constantly to get their games featured. Publishing games, funding them. And they make Unreal Engine which is driving a giant chunk of advancement in the industry.

Compared to Valve, EPIC are literally saints. MS store also lowered their cut. Still you see devs ignore attempts to host a better deal for them and only use Steam. They're doing it to themselves. Sometimes they don't even patch their games on other stores because they have to go through checks to make sure it's ruling out EXACTLY this kind of thing.

Sure, it's not all devs. But it's a lot of them.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

Well look at what EPIC did. Lowered the cut they take. Free games meaning they're cutting people checks constantly to get their games featured. Publishing games, funding them. And they make Unreal Engine which is driving a giant chunk of advancement in the industry.
Compared to Valve, EPIC are literally saints. MS store also lowered their cut. Still you see devs ignore attempts to host a better deal for them and only use Steam. They're doing it to themselves. Sometimes they don't even patch their games on other stores because they have to go through checks to make sure it's ruling out EXACTLY this kind of thing.
Sure, it's not all devs. But it's a lot of them.

You preach to the choir
In the dev community EPIC is held in a much much higher regard than Valve, due to all the steps they did in recent years.
EGS only taking 12% and UE being free until you reach $1 million were great news for us.
But ultimately its simply impossible for EPIC to compete with an entrenched quasi-monopoly like Valve.
As a dev if you arent on Steam your game might as well not exist - this isnt a good thing, but we have no choice.

 

[winjer]

Do you know if they had any AV running?
But regardless if the endusers did or did not - it is clearly Valve´s responsibility to make sure stuff like this doesnt get released!
Valve makes so much money, why should they get away with this sort of thing if they actually had the power to change that?
Have we already become so complacent with tech companies that we are ok with this?

Because its impossible to that.
Even major AV companies take a few days to update their signatures for new viruses.

Modern virus have very advanced obsfuscation technologies, that all tech companies struggle to keep up with.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

Because its impossible to that.
Even major AV companies take a few days to update their signatures for new viruses.
Modern virus have very advanced obsfuscation technologies, that all tech companies struggle to keep up with.

Yes this is true for super sophisticated stuff.
But the Block Blaster malware was amateur hour, it connected to a telegram channel!

https://s.dou.ua/storage-files/Block_Blasters_-_Forensic_Report.pdf

 

[Magic Carpet]

Not a good look for Valve at all.

You summed it up for me nicely here.
This makes Valve look bad. Black eye bad.

 

[Randall365]

I am not convinced Valve are to blame here. The game was free, so why should Valve scrutinise it - presumably they make no money from it? They took it down when they realised there was a problem.

 

[winjer]

Yes this is true for super sophisticated stuff.
But the Block Blaster malware was amateur hour, it connected to a telegram channel!

https://s.dou.ua/storage-files/Block_Blasters_-_Forensic_Report.pdf

So much malware released every day that is unsophisticated and not caught immediately by big tech companies.
Just recently, Google was serving ads with malware.

All these companies have automated AV systems. And still, they all fail sometimes.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

So much malware released every day that is unsophisticated and not caught immediately by big tech companies.
Just recently, Google was serving ads with malware.
All these companies have automated AV systems. And still, they all fail sometimes.

Sure, but how is this an excuse for Valve to not even do the most basic check that could have found this one?

 

[winjer]

Sure, but how is this an excuse for Valve to not even do the most basic check that could have found this one?

You are assuming that Valve doesn't do AV checks, just because one slipped by.
The reality is that they do, just like any other tech company. And one happened to slip by.
Just consider that Valve publishes on Steam, thousands of indie games, every year. If they didn't have an automated AV checking, we would be flooded with games with malware.

 

[Soodanim]

Sure, but how is this an excuse for Valve to not even do the most basic check that could have found this one?

This circumvented their checks by including a password protected zip that the batch file unzipped and ran.

The most obvious take away is to not allow passworded archives.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

You are assuming that Valve doesn't do AV checks, just because one slipped by.
The reality is that they do, just like any other tech company. And one happened to slip by.

If this happend once, fine - but happend multiple times already.

Just consider that Valve publishes on Steam, thousands of indie games, every year. If they didn't have an automated AV checking, we would be flooded with games with malware.

Or they could additionally hire people to do indepth checks - but I guess thats just too much to ask from a company that could easily afford it.