I wanted to because I liked HellDivers 1, but we’ve already talked on the show twice about how 2 is sadly not happening any time soon.
We talked about it on a recent show in terms of its egregious anti-cheat despite being a co-op PvE game.
The anti-cheat problems alone are making it a no-deal.
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Well, they can’t all be VAC, I guess. Which is definitely not a Ring 0 anti-cheat, absolutely not. Now let me take a big sip of my coffee while looking up how VAC works…
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VAC is from an extremely trustworthy company. VAC has been operating safely and reliably since 2002. I don’t want to say it never happened, because I don’t know that, but I’ve never heard of anyone’s computer being messed up by VAC. It’s had all that time to turn evil, and has yet to do so. And as far as third parties exploiting it, haven’t seen that happen yet either. It’s been constantly updated to prevent exactly that. The few times there have been any small issue with it, they are corrected quickly. It’s also completely unnoticeable to the user.
nProtect GameGuard is from INCA Internet, a Korean software security company. They are also about as old, but nowhere near as trustworthy. It’s one of those companies that provides Korean banking “security” software. That’s a whole topic in and of itself. The TL;DR is that if you want to certain things online in South Korea, especially banking, you have to install a whole pile of security apps that are basically just malware, security through obscurity, and have themselves been exploited on more than one occasion. They are not to be trusted.
I wouldn’t install software from INCA Internet on my computer even if it were running without any admin permissions whatsoever.
I think the foolish part there is trusting Valve more than another company. They’re a company, they do not give a fuck about us, and even if they’ve not done so to this point(though there’s plenty of dev stories that indicate they’re definitely not as nice and trustworthy as their PR would suggest), it would make no difference to them to fuck us over tomorrow.
Not trusting corporations doesn’t stop just because they’re corporations we like, or are convenient to us.
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Nobody is saying that Valve couldn’t suddenly go wrong. I’m saying that in all the time of their existence, they have been doing the right thing, at least in this aspect. They could lose that trust at any moment, but so far they have not. They’ve earned it, which is really quite hard to do. The second they fuck up, instant uninstall. Until then, no worries.
These other companies, from the moment I knew about them they already had a terrible untrustworthy track record. Never install.
It’s a lot like the Lenovo situation. ThinkPads were great. Lenovo started making them instead, and did a good job. I even bought one, and it still works! Then they shipped a ThinkPad with malware pre-installed. Never bought any Lenovo product since.
There’s a much larger discussion to be had regarding trust in institutions and organizations in general. Trust is very difficult and time consuming to earn, but it’s quick and easy to lose it. Once lost, it’s exponentially harder to regain. Major tech companies have seen fit to exchange their hard earned trust for short term gains, losing more trust than any other organizations in this country.
The fact that Valve has yet to do so is noteworthy. They haven’t even joined the latest layoff wave. The last news I can find regarding Valve layoffs was just 19 VR employees in 2019.
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