Overview

Steam provides several tools to help manage cheating in online video games. Whether you choose to integrate our anti-cheat APIs or use your own solution, make sure you give your customers proper warning that such a system exists and that you have UI ingame that clearly explains the ban.

For an introduction to anti-cheat and general best practices, we recommend that you watch the Steam Dev Days talk "Anti-Cheat for Multiplayer Games" (slides)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI7V60r7Jco

Game Bans

Game Bans allow you to utilize Valve’s banning infrastructure rather than implement your own ban tracking system. When you ban a player using the ICheatReportingService/RequestPlayerGameBan Web API, the ban will be publicly visible on that person's Steam profile.

Best Practices

Below is a list of best practices when using the provided Steamworks anti-cheat services. For broader anti-cheat best practices, please refer to the video above.

1. Running servers for your game is strongly suggested. Having a server handle game state and only transmitting game state to the user when necessary can help prevent cheating. For example only transmitting player position when necessary. The server can also be authoritative on player position and other game states to prevent speed hacking or god mode.
   
2. If your game uses peer-to-peer, each user should validate the others to prevent the host from having full control of the game state which would allow them to cheat or bypass restrictions.
   
3. When a user is banned or kicked they should receive clear messaging in-game explaining why they are unable to play.
   
4. Game bans are only designed to manage cheating. They should only be applied to players who gained an unfair competitive advantage when playing multiplayer versions of content and services.

Required Permissions For Editing Anti-Cheat Policies

Who can set or edit Anti-Cheat policies for my product?
Only certain publisher accounts have the necessary permissions to enable or adjust anti-cheat policies for your products on Steam. If you don't have the necessary permissions as detailed below, the best bet is to contact one of your Steamworks Administrators, which is a user within your organization that has the ability to grant permissions. A list of your Steamworks Administrators can be found on the right column of your Steamworks home page (unless you are an Administrator yourself).

The following permissions are required for a specific account in order to set or adjust anti-cheat policies for a product:

• Your account must have the specific permission: "Manage Signing" for the product in question. See Managing Your Steamworks Account for more details.

Gift Restrictions

Enabling Anti-Cheat API access affects gift copies of your game!
By default, games can either be bought for a user's own account, or sent as a gift from that user. But If a user sends a gift to someone who gets permanently banned, that user will not be able to gift the game again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does a Game Ban impact the user?
A: When a user is banned via the ICheatReportingService, the following happens:

• The account cannot join secure servers for the AppIDs they are banned.
  
• The ban is publicly displayed on their Steam Community profile.
  
• If the user is accessing the game via Family Library Sharing, the ban is also applied to the actual owner of the game.
  
• The user will not be eligible for an automatic refund

More details can be found in our customer facing FAQ: Banned by Game Developer (Game Ban).

Q: Can I use bans in other games to block users from playing in my game?
A: No. Game bans should only prevent the user from playing on secure servers in the game they received a ban in. A permanent ban should only be issued for your game if the user was caught cheating in your game.