It isn’t easy as you say.
If they could let us run games in a sandbox/virtualised area that would be amazing though. That’s a very big ask though.
I do know that xbox consoles run games in their own hyper-v vm which gives extra protections to us from most malicious code.
Obviously this would be hard for Steam to implement, but it would be a very nice measure.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I didn’t say it was easy. The fact is, valve could do it. It is just somewhat expensive. Make a law that game distributors are liable for losses if they distribute malware and you would see how well they could do it.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I believe you said it was easy in the first sentence of the comment I replied to, though maybe I am reading it wrong and you are speaking on something else.
Nevertheless, they surely have the money to make some type of sandboxed environment for us to run games in, but I can also see why they haven’t since they have so many other things in the works right now and I believe they famously don’t have that many employees (they could hire more, but that could ruin their workflow, etc, not sure). Still, I would like to see this somewhere in the future so I can be a bit more carefree when running less known games.
Maybe this is something that operating systems need to do for us though, I don’t know. Xbox can do it because Windows/HyperV allow it to, but they are created by the same company so the lines are blurred a bit. Not to mention use cases for PC gaming are much wider in scope, so the sandbox environment would have a lot more things to consider (probably).
Anyways I still think this would be sorta far fetched, but I can dream it will soon exist.
Not sure how I feel about making software distributors liable for the malware (it would make any smaller stores go out of business straight away for sure).
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
You are right I did say easy. In my head I meant that valve pay for it and such, not that it was technically easy. But what I typed didn’t line up.
And as far as sandboxing, I wasn’t really thinking vm sandboxing, I was thinking they could litterally take a whole pc, run the game and see what it does. I assume they could probably do that in a less labor intensive way like run it in the cloud and watch for the process to try to detect that as well. All in all I was thinking more testing env, and not end user changes. Cause yeah, end user support for isolating processes should be on the OS.
But in general, they should do a better job vetting publishers and ensuring those publishers can be held accountable. That is hard to do without blocking out the smaller publishers, but I have faith that if they put a few minds to it, they could figure it out. Probably could contract out the planning part to some experts so they wouldn’t have to perm hire a lot. Might even be able to contract out the vetting so they could pass the liability on.
A crazy thought just hit me. Something like fdic insurance. Won’t happen with this admin in the US, but if the gov setup the vetting guidelines, they could insure the vetters for damages if they followed the guidelines. That would spur vetters into existence that valve and others could then contract. Pipe dream I am sure.