Reason for game to access microphone?

[Lisław Szymoh]

Is there any reason the game wants to access my microphone? Windows 10 clearly shows that the app starts listening in as soon as it's launched. There better be a good reason.

[Pesky]

Nothing in the game reacts to real-life noise.

However, I'm running Windows 10 and when I start the App the game does not access my microphone. What are you looking at which suggests microphone access ? Is there a chance that it's Steam which is doing this, connected with streaming features, rather than the game itself ?

[Lisław Szymoh]

I get the standard microphone icon in the win10 tray, and when I hover over it it says "INFRA.exe is accessing your microphone"

Also, there is this thread:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/251110/discussions/1/1736588252392547003/

And no, other games launched through steam do not trigger that. I guess I'll just refund the game, because this seems shady at best.

[Pesky]

Please wait before asking for a refund. I'm going to ask about this on the game's Discord.

if you don't run the game while you wait Steam won't add any 'runtime' to it, and the pause will not affect your chance of a refund.

[Pesky]

Running INFRA myself under Windows 10 does not activate the microphone icon for me. However I can make that icon show up by using any app which I would expect to use the microphone, for example a chat app.

I have confirmation from the game's Discord that the game's game engine, Source (as used for Portal 2) automatically checks that a microphone is present each time the game starts up. The game itself does not use the sound input API and does not care whether a microphone is present or not.

You can click on the microphone icon and turn off access for "Allow desktop apps to access your microphone".

[saltywalrus]

INFRA is based off of a modified version of Portal 2 source code, a game which includes a co-op mode with voice chat. The microphone is never accessed by INFRA to do anything, but since the devs neglected too (or couldn't) cut out the code around voice chat, it automatically tries to access your microphone on start up the same way portal 2 does.

Rest assured, microphone input is never actually used.