Re: Running a gaming PC without local admin rights is frustrating
Valve have been doing this for ages, they should have worked out what permissions are needed when by now.
My understanding (I may have misunderstood) is that some games developed by 3rd parties need write access on their game installation directories. I believe this is usually for older games, say Leisure Suite Larry or Civilization I/II for example, hopefully no modern games do this (but that's a forlorn hope I expect).
Therefore to enable these games to run, they decided to handle this in the most lazy brute-force way imaginable, by setting the entire Steam tree as writeable.
However, surely they could have handled these apps by having the apps installation tree writeable? e.g. (if installed in standard place - doing this from memory as I don't have steam on this computer) \Program Files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\<app installation>.
Therefore only those games that need write have only their sub-directory, not the entire steam tree or indeed other apps installed via steam, writeable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
