Valve games include cheat prevention. To properly use cheat prevention, a program has to inventory other running programs and apply heuristics.
It also downloads, executes, and occasionally updates (in the background) files for games you have through Steam.
So, yes, it would need access to do all of these things. It might seem shocking to a Mac user, but us on Windows have programs do this sort of thing all the time (and you don't hear us gassin' on about it (I apologize for the Futurama reference)).
Cue posts about "that's the problem with Windows" or similar, but I honestly don't see any other way to detect cheating automatically. You can manually "spec" players, but any sufficiently advanced aimbot built with stealth in mind won't insta-aim like a bot, and any half-competent cheater (hah!) will not make it obvious he's map hacking.
Sorry Mac users, I have little sympathy. You wanted Steam, but don't like what it does. Uninstall the Mac version if it's bothering you that much, and boot into Windows XP.
It actually doesn't need access to download & update games, since those are simply kept inside the user's home directory.
It also doesn't need admin access to view all running processes, any user on a unix system can do so.
That being said… I'm pretty sure Steam never actually asked me for an admin password (and I run in a non-privileged account), so I'm not quite sure what this guy is talking about.
In any case, Steam isn't running with any elevated privileges on my own system (I already had access enabled for assistive devices, which Steam only seems to need to actually launch its games), so I have no complaint on a security standpoint.
My only complaint with Steam so far is that it hardcodes the directory it stores the games. I want to put them elsewhere.
I did not specifically want Steam (never seen it before, and not sure how I feel about it from the brief experience I've had with it), but I do appreciate a wider choice of games. Maybe the titles that get ported for Steam Play will become available outside of Steam, and become less invasive. Right now there is nothing on this channel that I'd like to buy and can't get in some other manner.
I'd think the same thing, but in practice, I've been surprised at the number of games I've wanted to buy because of Steam. Many people might not appreciate it, but I think it's cool when they pop a message announcing Title X has gone from $44.99 to $9.99 as an unannounced weekend special.
I picked up the entire Overlord series for $4.99 one weekend, just because it was that cheap. They don't do this with current bestsellers that they can still sell for around $50, of course, but it's nice picking up a cheap game that I know I won't lose the disc for.
Liking the convenience, but want to know that a popular hub accepting inbound connections and open to third-party publishers has some sort of security built in, OS or otherwise. They seem to be going around the OS, and I don't think it's necessary.
More importantly than what others have commented... this is why there are daemons and different parts of the app can run at different levels of execution for security reasons...
It also downloads, executes, and occasionally updates (in the background) files for games you have through Steam.
So, yes, it would need access to do all of these things. It might seem shocking to a Mac user, but us on Windows have programs do this sort of thing all the time (and you don't hear us gassin' on about it (I apologize for the Futurama reference)).
Cue posts about "that's the problem with Windows" or similar, but I honestly don't see any other way to detect cheating automatically. You can manually "spec" players, but any sufficiently advanced aimbot built with stealth in mind won't insta-aim like a bot, and any half-competent cheater (hah!) will not make it obvious he's map hacking.
Sorry Mac users, I have little sympathy. You wanted Steam, but don't like what it does. Uninstall the Mac version if it's bothering you that much, and boot into Windows XP.