No not in the US. While most Americans (~70%) are within 10 miles (16km) of a grocery store as foreigners would recognize them, the other 30% have either a Dollar General or Family Dollar. Just those two choices. Sometimes both if they’re lucky. For ~10% of Americans they are 30 miles (48km) or more from a grocery store and usually 10 miles from a dollar store.

With rising gas prices and the lack of infrastructure across the majority (>80%) of landmass in the US, many rural Americans have to have 4x4 vehicles in order to just drive to their job and back, so an extra ~3 gallons of gas for groceries doesn’t make sense as anything but a monthly expense; and even then statistically the only thing they could get to is a Walmart which is the most common grocery store in the United States; or just as bad a Kroger Brand company or Albertson’s brand company. Those are the three grocery stores that statistically exist for >95% of the US population, and theoretically if you’re banned from one in a specific brand family you’re banned from all in that brand family.

That’s called addiction, and using religion to fix it is replacing one addiction with another.

The solution to addiction is accountability, not pretending the voice in your head is an all powerful deity, much less one that has explicitly abandoned you if you actually follow the Torah.

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World of Warcraft (yes it still has a bot problem, turns out it’s even more complicated of an analysis with hundreds of thousands of people playing the game wrong) unironically is the biggest game to do this and report on it. They track player movement, skill usage, cursor position on screen and likely a thousand more data points to determine if a real player could possibly do the things being done and auto flag and auto ban based on that.

I believe VAC also has heuristic capability for FPSs if you enable it as a developer, as CS2 (at least, I think CS Source had a similar system) can detect unrealistic movements, perfectly timed clicks and all manner of movement scripts based solely on timing and not memory editing or other executable interference.

But yes most games really don’t want to have an active cybersecurity team dedicated solely to studying game mechanics and deciding what is or isn’t realistic, and while heuristic analysis of memory (i.e. catching injected cheats) is also a thing, that also requires a security team capable of that; and as someone who once tried to get into the cybersecurity field all of that is expensive. You’re not getting a single person, much less a team, for less than 6 figures a year, and the amount of work generated that cannot be automated necessitates a fairly large team. CS2 gets around this a bit by having trusted players review iffy VAC detections which then feed into VACnet (which was released fairly recently) to have AI auto-review the heuristic detections based on known good reviews; but still the sheer volume of detections in a heuristic system (even well tuned ones) requires constant moderation.

No, Heuristic Analysis is deciding what data is likely, what data is unlikely, and what data is impossible, and then deciding, on that scale, the where the data the player is generating resides.

In short: Humans have natural variations in everything they do, even the top 0.0001% of players. So let’s say you want to tackle aimbots in an FPS.

The first thought would be track the number of headshots, and then if a player gets 100% headshots they’re labeled a cheater – but that isn’t accurate because of players like the streamer Shroud. So let’s be smarter. Let’s analyze the median player based on data from every player – not their headshots, not where they shoot, but how they move the cursor to the opponent to shoot.

An aimbot will do a simple mathematical formula to decide how to aim at the target; i.e. if we imagine a 2d grid (centered at 0,0; squared limits of 100) on the screen and the player’s crosshair is at 0,0 and there’s an enemy at 50,50; then a bot would do something like (complete pseudocode:)

While CrosshairPosition(y) does not equal EnemyPosition(y):
    Move mouse up (i.e. +y) by 1
    While CrosshairPosition(x) does not equal EnemyPosition(x):
        Move mouse right (i.e. +x) by 1
Fire()

This results in a predictable and perfectly diagonal move towards the enemy. Now actual humans cannot do this. It doesn’t matter how fine of motor skills they have, period. It is impossible for a human to even accidentally move like this. So we place this in the ‘impossible’ end of the spectrum.

If a player does too many unlikely or impossible actions, flag them for review, and ban them that way. Or, just ban the ones doing objectively mathematically impossible things.

Heuristic Data Analysis requires actual humans actually thinking about what is and isn’t possible in a game, understanding how cheats AND the game actually work, and then defining the spectrum, and then implementing and constantly tweaking it to minimize false positives while maximizing those that tweak their bots to get around the analysis.

Because of this it’s expensive, relatively speaking, than paying a (statistically Israeli) anti cheat company to install spyware on their behalf.

…So to educate you, locally hosted servers, which all CDNs use, allow for greater download speeds and less overall network strain and complexity, which reduces the chance for failed downloads via lost packets.

Every single download and major content service you have used in the last 15 years has used this, and this is why your downloads rarely if ever say ‘download failed’ like they did pre-2005.

This is also very expensive, hosting a server in every major country/download area and then replicating files across those disparate servers is expensive.

Let’s say you want to host your 2GB game, and only that, in the US and Europe. Well the US is a giant place but the core infrastructure is good enough that you can get away with a single location, so that’s two servers. Each will probably be $50/month or so per 500GB traffic (since it’s just file hosting we don’t care about stats, but you’re not getting above 10Mbps for less than that at that traffic limit).

That’s 250 times that can download your game. In America. And 250 in Europe. Let’s say you get the ideal sales numbers and 500 people buy your game.

If you’re selling your game for $5, that is one download per person for their lifetime that you can afford(assuming 30% or less goes to hosting) If you increase your price to $7.20 you hit that 30% cap but those 500 people can download it any time for a year. Or, if we assume we get 6,000 people (the theoretical maximum number of people that can download your game at that price) you can have a salary of $25,920.

But lets be honest, most indie games off steam never make it to 6,000 sales. And the ones that do take years of basically hosting for free as a passion project.

So make your game cost… $21? Well you’ve cut off any chance of anyone outside of the US and Europe of ever buying your game, but you can now host for 3 years for those 6,000 sales and you’d even have a decent enough salary to pay tax… which for a small business in the US will take another 3rd of your costs, and you still haven’t paid for marketing or your payment provider fees or their taxes or sales tax or VAT for Europe…

Or. You pay steam that 30%. They handle hosting, which already cost you 30%, and everything else, and the admin overhead of selling to 190 countries like calculating (and already paying out of your cut) tax.

You really think you can independently afford high speed localized 24/7 file hosting all over the world for potentially millions of downloads for less than 30% of your sell price?

Steam games can be cheap because steam offers all the expensive things cheaply. No one is going to download your game off of a shady MEGA link. No one is going to go to fucknuts.biz.co.uk.nz to your shady site straight from squarespace templates to then crash your filehost by trying to download your game at the same time as 500 other people. No one is going to trust you with their bank details and crypto is a scam and paypal also takes a high cut.

If your goal is to do gaming more than a thankless, pay free hobby you need:

Marketing Trust Payment Provider Global CDN And ease of use.

Unless your game is so incredibly niche AND so incredibly good that you can get away with shunning all of those things, you will need those to make enough money to even make a minimum wage salary after a year. Starsector and dwarf fortress are the only ones that come to mind, and the latter went to steam after Tarn decided to actually go full time and needed a real income to cover hosting and salary that couldn’t be found in donations.

Data centers are expensive. And yes profit is built in to steam’s cut because they know most players aren’t going to repeatedly download any given game over the lifetime of their steam account. But doing it yourself means either you do not offer repeat download to players, or you run out of money in two years because people stop buying the game but people will still download it again and again.