Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

> Personally I don't like installing games as root, because the game developer doesn't have the level of trust that my Linux distributor has earned over the years.

Unfortunately, that's probably a holdover from game dev on Windows. In theory, you're supposed to install to Program Files (or Program Files (x86)) and store any user config data in My Documents. But most games just install with full admin privileges, and dump everything in Program Files.

Many modern games are more than just games too, they come with patchers/installers that may require extra permissions, and they also tend to run extra anti cheat softare in the background that require elevated privileges.

View on HN

Few games actually need those admin priveleges: Windows since Vista has a feature called VirtualStore which maps underprivileged writes to Program Files to a location inside AppData (which is also where games and apps should save their non-user-facing runtime files - not in My Documents, which is an annoying antipattern).

Your point about patchers is salient - but I know that, say, Steam puts everything in Program Files and does not run itself or games as admin. Other games like League of Legends and World of Tanks work around the issue by installing outside Program Files.

I wasn't aware of Virtual Store, that's actually quite nifty! And I was wrong about My Documents being the preferential place to store it. According to [0] it's AppData, as you say.

I never meant to imply that the elevated features were necessary for the reasons mentioned, but it's _why_ it happens. In general, a company publishing a game isn't going to put it's top engineers on writing the installer. Those engineers will be fixing engine bugs or perf upgrades or have moved on to the next project by the time that point comes around, so chances are the installers are written by not necessarily the best people for it, which exacerbates the issue.

Finally, it doesn't help that gamers are conditioned to granting admin priveleges to their games and installers.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patricka/2010/03/18/where-s...

Steam removes all the security from the folder that holds installed games. Which is... a solution, I suppose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com