The mystery of spacewar

[Mayfly]

Some of you may know about Spacewar. It's a steam game apparently designed to help developers learn about steamworks. It also seems like a lot of players use it to trick steam and play pirated games.

However! If we go into the game, we can actually play, even with friends. To do that, we hit "Create Lobby", and a lobby will be created by the name of "username's lobby" (so for example in my case it's "Nickesponja's Lobby"). Then our friends go to "Find Lobby" and join our lobby by name. The thing is, there are A LOT of lobbies. And by suspiciously creative names too ("p*tas y farolillos", which means "wh*res and lanterns" in spanish"). This lobbies will aparently have people in them, but these people never ever seem to be active. They don't set themselves as ready or start any game. But we've searched their names and those are actual profiles.

Now it could be that, when these people are playing pirated games, they get sent in one of those lobbies randomly. But that seems weird since there should be thousands of lobbies then. So what the heck is going on? And why do some of these lobbies have custom, funny names?

[wuddih]

because the pirate captains set those lobby names. not much so much mystery.

[Crashed]

As you had already mentioned Spacewar is a demo of the Steam API. As such you can of course play with your friends, however as you had probably noticed those public lobbies are not compatible with Spacewar since they were created by pirated games abusing the Steam API. They will appear in-game but of course not work because those lobbies do not speak Spacewar but instead the stolen games that are impersonating Spacewar in order to bypass the Steam DRM.

That said, I wonder if it is possible for Valve to put up security checks to prevent anyone who isn't either a bona fide developer or actually playing Spacewar from accessing the Steam API through that AppID.