Allow us to stop updates from happening; Unity is malware

[Jimmio92]

Old steam client allowed you to run your game even if it wasn't up to date. That feature was removed because I assume Valve agreed with Microsoft -- auto updates benefit the user.

That's not the case at all. Unity just recently merged with a known malware publisher. I have 30 some games made in Unity, and they're all completely trash if they update again, because we, the users, cannot know for sure if the underlying engine has been updated to include adware crap from ironSource. ironSource is responsible for InstallCore, which installed other applications during a normal install, some of which were known malware. That product died after Sophos, Microsoft Essential, and Malwarebytes blacklisted it, but the terrible business practices are still there.

Valve, protect your users. Allow us to stop updates. Allow me to keep my 30 or so Unity games that I paid hard earned money for.

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

引用自 Spawn of Totoro：

引用自 Lustrous Spirit：

I'm a bit lost, what update did the Unity Engine get thats gone down?

Unity merged with a company (ironSource)they had been working with for year, to supply ads in the mobile games that people used Unity to make. ironSource had been the developer of InstallCore that many malware creators used to bundle their software and distribute it, causing it to be considered malware on it's own by many Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware makers.

They stopped developing InstallCore in 2020 and have since focused on their mobile ad development.

No update has been made to Unity. The merger simply allows Unity more access to the metadata that ironSource had/has from directed ads.

Due to the media, people are not worried that Unity will have an update forcing some kind of malware/adware into games, regardless of platform it seems.

Ahh I see, ty both for info!

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

So there's a bunch of back-and-forth above about whether the company that Unity merges with "really" made malware.

Regardless of that, though, there ought to be a built-in way to allow players to launch games through Steam even when updates are pending on them.

This is a feature that many have clamored for and would be useful for many people, from modders to people with older machines to people with spotty internet connectivity.

There's probably gonna be some brigading against this idea, as usual, because there's always a handful of folks here who insist that players shouldn't have options. Even though it's entirely possible to design such an option such that (1) the default is to keep updates coming and (2) the non-default choice still makes the availability of updates clearly visible to anyone who wants to launch the game without them anyway.

Anyhow, here's my usual re-posting of information about how I've heard you can get around the Steam client's current behavior of forcing updates by preventing you from launching games:

0. Set Steam to only update games on launch. This is a precursor step to some of the other steps below.

1. Launch the game directly from the executable (or a shortcut), without Steam running. This works for some games, possibly with some tweaking needed.

2. Go into Steam's Offline Mode then run the game. (I've heard this is more effective if you just launch from executable or from shortcut.)

3. Move the game files out of Steam (or just rename the folder), then tell Steam to uninstall the game, then move the game files back in (or rename it back) and launch the game from the executable (or shortcut).

4. Copy the game files out, let the update commence, then copy the old game files back in. (Doesn't save on internet data transfer but at least it lets you keep your old version.)

5. Modify the appmanifest files (or maybe their permissions, or permissions on the game files themselves), in order to make Steam think an update has already been applied or make it otherwise unable to update the game. I've heard there's an app to help automate this; I forgot where the link is though.

6. Download an old version via a Depot Downloader. I've heard this might not longer be possible though.

7. Buy the game from some platform that doesn't force updates. Many other places you can buy games (that offer downloads) don't, but any place that sells things DRM-free is guaranteed not to.

I hope that helps!

[Satoru]

引用自 DC-GS：

Isnt the danger the same as installing any games from unknown devs? Just keep Sophos, MSE etc running.
If you are concerned about privacy and adware - why allow them to access the internet in the first place? If privacy is important, you make your system save regardless how good or bad bad reputation of the installed software is.

Honestly just use MS Defender. Unless you have access to corporate level anti-virus, all consumer level anti-virus is hot trash. You might as well not pay for hot-trash anti-virus rather than paying a fee for hot trash anti-virus.

[Satoru]

引用自 Lustrous Spirit：

I'm a bit lost, what update did the Unity Engine get thats gone down?

* Unity purchased IronSource which is a company that specializes in delivering ads

* Unity stock price tanked not because investors hate IronSource, but because investors do not think this purchase really solves the core problems Unity has with its revenue streams. Aka it doesnt have increasing subscriptions, and its ad revenues from Unity based games delivering ads has tanked due to changes in iOS 14.5 that killed ALL targeted ads, including Facebook. Investors want revenue growth. And they do not perceive this purchase of IronSource as a strategy towards that. You can of course whine about how investors are killing Unity by forcing the board to do things like using dumptrucks full of money on acquiring ad companies. But investors don't actually care about the 'faux gamer rage' around IronSource. Investors care only because they don't think IronSource is going to fix Unity's problems. Lets be clear, if IronSource was found out to be using a Hell Portal on Mars by throwing orphaned babies into a sacrificial pit to increase ad revenue by 10,000% and that actually worked, they would LOVE this acquisition.

* Developers do not like the merger not because of IronSource. But because its an overall trend of Unity to keep throwing money at sales people harassing devs to renew subscriptions (refer to how companies like Yelp/TripAdvisor do this), and at ad revenue. Rather than addressing the literal mountain of cores issues that exist with the Unity game engine, with how minor updates cause literal months worth of work due to everything breaking, Unity removing core features without notice in updates, etc. Developers issues with Unity go back YEARS, and this single thing is not the actual problem. Its the hundreds of other things Unity has done, and not done, over years that is the problem. Gamedevs are angry because using Unity now is a giant liability from a purely gamedev programming perspective. Its fragile, as even insignificatn sub-minor updates cause huge issues with projects. Many things are languishing and not improving. Unity also recently announced their removal over old 'answers' forum which was not well received as many useful information was still archived there. Its death by a million cuts, and gamedevs are increasingly looking at things like Godot or Unreal Engine as alternatives.

[Judgmental Amaterasu]

引用自 Jimmio92：

Automatic updates are not secure.

The US federal government had tens of thousands of confidential files stolen by an automatic update.

I run a small business building and repairing computers. Three of my customer's Windows installs were bricked by automatic updates that you can't disable during the weather and news addition to the start bar.

On top of that, we, the end users, have no idea if a Unity title updated the engine. If we have no idea what version of the Unity engine is present, we have no idea if InstallSource's malware publishing made it into our games and software. We also don't even know what the timeline is on that being added.

CEO of Unity Technologies, former president of Electronic Arts, says game developers who don't design their game around monetization are "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiots". He suggests paying a dollar to retry a level. Do you want that embedded in your games? Loot boxes were also just made illegal in the EU, so... again, get with the times. Microtransactions are evil as hell, and in the process of being stamped out.. but that doesn't stop thousands upon thousands of people losing money by gambling on loot boxes in the meantime. Law moves slow, criminals move fast.

Malware is only discovered after it's been found, remember. That's millions of gamers, potentially, since updates happen extremely quickly with broadband internet.

I don't need to find proof of malware being present in the ads network that hasn't even been integrated into Unity yet; I need to remind people, and Valve, that automatic updates have been and will always be a security risk.

"runs a small business" also parrots clickbait and youtubers. That's not gonna last long.

[[TFA]Wolf]

引用自 wuddih：

Steam never had an option to run not updated games.

the rest is overblown paranoia of not knowing how game development works.

Yes it had, but that was back in 2015-ish, it was widely used by the Railworks/Train Simulator Community, as updates from DTG could be......varied in quality and playability. That is much better now, but you could run games in a not updated from.

The only way around it now is a different install which you have to manually patch.

The option to run a game without updating did exist from at least 2005-to at least 2015, which is a decade, so the never Claim, is patently false. I can only confirm it from 2005 onwards, as I wasn't on steam before 2005, when believe it or not, most games did not require a launching Plattform. And hell was Half-Life 2 controversial for requiring Steam.

Speaking of the Steam updater....it would be so nice if Valve Designed it to only replace the files it needs and not extract the whole game folder and then update and delete, requiring massive overheads to update.
Ran ito it again with Ready or not, because I only had 27 Gigs free on that SSD, but since Ready or not is 60 Gigs, of course it needs 60 GB to implement a 4.4 GB update.

Now you need to update to run the game or play it with friends, but if you can't update, because steam blocks it, you can't play.

As for Microsoft and it's updates, well there's a reason why Windows 11 is kinda dangerous, as it requires Safeboot* and a Microsoft account.There's a reason why most companies see no reason to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

*The problem with Safeboot being that it requires a Hardware side key and most mainboards are only given the Microsoft keys. To load those keys for say, Linux into it you have to take it out of Safeboot, which the Win 11 Bootloader blocks. Then load the keys.

However, if you can't switch out of Safeboot and have Windows load, yeah good luck. Which means MS is trying to make you unable to use another OS.

[Satoru]

引用自 TFAWolf：

The option to run a game without updating did exist from at least 2005-to at least 2015, which is a decade, so the never Claim, is patently false.

People keep saying this.

The only thing they did in 2015 was RENAME THE BUTTON

That's it

The button did the exact same thing it always did. It would defer updates until you ran the game again. Then it would update. The only thing Steam did, was to rename the text on the button to reflect what the button actually did.

There was no way to disable updates unless you were on a beta branch that did not change.

Again the ability to disable updates has never existed. Ever.

[BloodShed]

引用自 TFAWolf：

引用自 wuddih：

Steam never had an option to run not updated games.

the rest is overblown paranoia of not knowing how game development works.

Yes it had, but that was back in 2015-ish, it was widely used by the Railworks/Train Simulator Community, as updates from DTG could be......varied in quality and playability. That is much better now, but you could run games in a not updated from.

The only way around it now is a different install which you have to manually patch.

The option to run a game without updating did exist from at least 2005-to at least 2015, which is a decade, so the never Claim, is patently false. I can only confirm it from 2005 onwards, as I wasn't on steam before 2005, when believe it or not, most games did not require a launching Plattform. And hell was Half-Life 2 controversial for requiring Steam.

Speaking of the Steam updater....it would be so nice if Valve Designed it to only replace the files it needs and not extract the whole game folder and then update and delete, requiring massive overheads to update.
Ran ito it again with Ready or not, because I only had 27 Gigs free on that SSD, but since Ready or not is 60 Gigs, of course it needs 60 GB to implement a 4.4 GB update.

Now you need to update to run the game or play it with friends, but if you can't update, because steam blocks it, you can't play.

As for Microsoft and it's updates, well there's a reason why Windows 11 is kinda dangerous, as it requires Safeboot* and a Microsoft account.There's a reason why most companies see no reason to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

*The problem with Safeboot being that it requires a Hardware side key and most mainboards are only given the Microsoft keys. To load those keys for say, Linux into it you have to take it out of Safeboot, which the Win 11 Bootloader blocks. Then load the keys.

However, if you can't switch out of Safeboot and have Windows load, yeah good luck. Which means MS is trying to make you unable to use another OS.

Wrong

Different label but same function as it is now.

[Mad Scientist]

引用自 TFAWolf：

引用自 wuddih：

Steam never had an option to run not updated games.

the rest is overblown paranoia of not knowing how game development works.

Yes it had, but that was back in 2015-ish

The wording was different, but when you launched the game it would need to update in order to play. The wording was changed to remove that exact type of confusion. Anything dependent on a launcher through Steam however, would solely be on that launcher for getting update information and if any ability to choose if/when to get updates to do as such.

引用自 TFAWolf：

The option to run a game without updating did exist from at least 2005-to at least 2015

But when you ran it you had to update it unless the game was dependent on a launcher for updates, and that would mean you could choose not to get the updates from the launcher itself, not Steam, as the launcher would be the only immediate required updated thing.

[Spawn of Totoro]

引用自 Satoru：

引用自 TFAWolf：

The option to run a game without updating did exist from at least 2005-to at least 2015, which is a decade, so the never Claim, is patently false.

People keep saying this.

The only thing they did in 2015 was RENAME THE BUTTON

That's it

The button did the exact same thing it always did. It would defer updates until you ran the game again. Then it would update. The only thing Steam did, was to rename the text on the button to reflect what the button actually did.

There was no way to disable updates unless you were on a beta branch that did not change.

Again the ability to disable updates has never existed. Ever.

No, there was an option to run the game or wait for the update at one point, but that was short lived. It was a pop-up option when running a game that had a pending update. It wasn't a disable, it was a skip update and play that you had to go through every time you tried to launch the game.

I recall it there, but only briefly.

What they renamed was the "Do not automatically update this game" setting.

[DC-GS]

引用自 TFAWolf：

Speaking of the Steam updater....it would be so nice if Valve Designed it to only replace the files it needs and not extract the whole game folder and then update and delete, requiring massive overheads to update.

Steam already support that. For years.
Ask the developers why they prefer make huge archives which needs to be extracted, replacing only few kb of data and repackeging. Heck, sometimes all they update in the archives are a versionnumber!
As long the user keep blaming the Steam updater for long updates, the devs wont change how they roll out updates.

[[TFA]Wolf]

引用自 DC-GS：

引用自 TFAWolf：

Speaking of the Steam updater....it would be so nice if Valve Designed it to only replace the files it needs and not extract the whole game folder and then update and delete, requiring massive overheads to update.

Steam already support that. For years.
Ask the developers why they prefer make huge archives which needs to be extracted, replacing only few kb of data and repackeging. Heck, sometimes all they update in the archives are a versionnumber!
As long the user keep blaming the Steam updater for long updates, the devs wont change how they roll out updates.

Now that is a good point, admittedly it is a problem if the devs do it.
On the other hand they do it, because they are allowed to. It would be good business practice for steam to disallow that, given that it would reduce their required bandwith and traffic significantly.

Makes one remember the old days of manually downloading patches quite fondly, when only the necessary stuff was downloaded.

I'm off to raise the issue. ;)


@Spawn of Totro @Mr Gentlebot @Bloodshed @Satoru Well strangely enough I do remember there being a major furor in the Train Sim 20XX community around 2014-2015 about that very issue, as in 2013 and early 2014 monst still ran games with the "do not update" setting and only updated on manual request. This was mainly due to TS 2015 (released in September 2014) and TS 2016 (September 2015) were the nadir of patch quality and most did wait a few months for the new versions to mature before updating.

Discussion about that oficially did not happen in the official steam forums....if you know what that means.

And I can remember using that option a few times, which was before I used custom installations outside the steam folder. And while you could be asked to update quite a a lot, if you chose not to update it would still launch.
I think you're going off recent memories and think that it has always been like this.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

引用自 TFAWolf：

@Spawn of Totro @Mr Gentlebot @Bloodshed @Satoru Well strangely enough I do remember there being a major furor in the Train Sim 20XX community around 2014-2015 about that very issue, as in 2013 and early 2014 monst still ran games with the "do not update" setting and only updated on manual request. This was mainly due to TS 2015 (released in September 2014) and TS 2016 (September 2015) were the nadir of patch quality and most did wait a few months for the new versions to mature before updating.

And see this is a reason (entirely separate from whether Unity is/contains malware) why it's important for players to be able to manage their own updates rather than be forced to update.

It's also evidence that players know how to exercise such an option.

It's furthermore also evidence that players don't necessarily want to preclude all updates, but just want to keep the game running properly even when the update can't do that.

(Previous instances of this thread topic had at least one person who labeled the proposal and its proponents as "anti-update" and kept trying to argue that update do good things and therefore all updates should be welcomed.)

[DC-GS]

引用自 TFAWolf：

引用自 DC-GS：

Steam already support that. For years.
Ask the developers why they prefer make huge archives which needs to be extracted, replacing only few kb of data and repackeging. Heck, sometimes all they update in the archives are a versionnumber!
As long the user keep blaming the Steam updater for long updates, the devs wont change how they roll out updates.

Now that is a good point, admittedly it is a problem if the devs do it.
On the other hand they do it, because they are allowed to. It would be good business practice for steam to disallow that, given that it would reduce their required bandwith and traffic significantly.

Makes one remember the old days of manually downloading patches quite fondly, when only the necessary stuff was downloaded.

Valves philosophy is avoid restrictions if possible. The publisher can decide which DRM they use, if the game is bound so some accounts, or how they distribute the gamefiles.
While my hopes are tiny to see a change, I'm all for it!

The worst offender I can remember is Payday2. 10 MB download, need to repack every single damn file - about 30GB.
With HDDs, sometimes I would just delete the game and download it again. Faster than patching the old version.

引用自 TFAWolf：

I'm off to raise the issue. ;)

Be loud but polite!

[Mars]

Unity owner is already shady never played unity game since then