Antivirus softwares block my steam game on windows

Solar2D Win32 Desktop
#1

Hi,

I had uploaded my game on steam a few days back. The game is currently in beta and I’ve been distributing keys to many users to playtest, stream etc. Many of them have reported an issue that their antivirus programs don’t let them run the game even when downloaded and run via the steam launcher. Though some would make an exception and flag the game as safe, others wouldn’t dare to play assuming it to be risky. 

I have gone through the documentation of corona and understand that this happens to be the case if the game is not digitally signed. But looking up the net I also get to hear people saying steam games don’t require a digital certificate as the games are run by steam through their client and certificates are necessary only for distribution outside steam without DRM. 

My question is, am I missing something out here? Is there some kind of a permission that I might have turned on that the antivirus is blocking? Or is there any other workaround to this problem that someone could suggest? 

As an indie developer I find these certificates quite expensive also not to mention most of them have to be renewed once every year. Any information regarding this would be certainly helpful.

Thanks. 

#2

What might help is knowing what virus software is complaining and exactly what the message is. We’ve had some .dll libraries in the past that virus detectors complain might be collecting data with out letting you know. We’ve sense removed them, but it’s possible you’re using an older version of Corona where we haven’t removed the offending libraries. (BTW: the virus scanning software was being over aggressive in its scanning). The virus scanning could be complaining about something new.

Now certificates are a different complaint that virus scanner like to throw. The message will be something about an untrusted developer. This is why the exact messaging is important.

Now when it comes to Steam and how they handle code signing, that’s going to be stepping outside of our experience. Hopefully someone from the community can chime in on that.

Rob

#3

Thanks for your response Rob. You are right about the importance of the nature of message. I was mistaken in assuming that this could have happened due to lack of a certificate but that clearly doesn’t seem to be the case.

I tried to get back to some of our users and though most of them were not able to reproduce the scenario, one of them could and reported that his antivirus had flagged the game as a threat and triggered an idp.generic warning message. I looked up the net and found it could be a case of false positive but that’s just based on one person’s input.

Is there any file that corona includes in its builds that could potentially trigger an idp.generic alert? 

#4

I found this article on a Google Search and it could be an AVG or Avast definitions file being out of date. But in the screenshot in the article, it shows that it flags a file that it had issues with. It would be really helpful to know what file it’s having issues with.

Rob

#5

Difficult to pinpoint the file but what I recollect from the screenshots that users sent is that it was the .exe file that the antivirus softwares were blocking. Could you drop a link to the article you’re referring to? Thanks.

#6

Sorry, forgot to paste the link in:

https://errorcodespro.com/idp-generic/

Rob