Thanks for the effort digging. This does not actually point out any game doing it in particular though, and it’s actually a perfect example of a working antivirus picking up a suspect file (a password protected archive) in a game’s install tree.
This is from Aug 2024 and could even be from one of the games that distributed malware. Its absolutely something that Steam should be blocking/flagging for manual review, and a huge red flag that any developer would use this as a tool for distributing their game content.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 day ago
How is a password protected zip file different from an encrypted blob? And a quick Google will show you dozens of devs asking how to do this in different engines, because it’s a very simple way to delay access to something, it won’t be permanent, but it can allow you to do stuff like pre-loading that game/DLC and activate them remotely.
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
The difference is that passworded zip files are used to distribute malware regularly. For a few reasons such as they’re very simple to use (malware creators are often lazy) and they can be generally be unpacked with preinstalled libraries or programs on the OS. A random encrypted file will require a DLL or runtime that can unpack the blob, and antivirus engines find that kind of stuff packaged together very sus.