PC Did my company just screw me over?

[Crater Creator]

After mulling it over with moderators, no more discussion of playing without Steam, please.  It's too close to discussing piracy, which is against the rules. Officially, you need to be running Steam to play the game, and this is intentional.

Now, as far as ways to play that still use Steam... the OP is on a Mac, and Apple provides Boot Camp to run Windows & Mac partitions on the same system.  If your company only cares about software installed on the Mac partition (I'm guessing they wouldn't give you a Mac unless your work was done in macOS), you could create a Windows partition with Boot Camp and play the game on that.

Advantage: you'd likely experience better performance under Windows anyway.

Advantage: you have to reboot between operating systems, which creates a psychological barrier between work and play.

Disadvantage: there's no security layer per se between the two partitions, so if Steam led to some malware that indiscriminately corrupts data, it could reach your important work stuff on the Mac partition as well as the Windows partition.  Your IT department will likely not be happy with you.

 

[Vampirenostra]

After mulling it over with moderators, no more discussion of playing without Steam, please.  It's too close to discussing piracy, which is against the rules. Officially, you need to be running Steam to play the game, and this is intentional.

Now, as far as ways to play that still use Steam... the OP is on a Mac, and Apple provides Boot Camp to run Windows & Mac partitions on the same system.  If your company only cares about software installed on the Mac partition (I'm guessing they wouldn't give you a Mac unless your work was done in macOS), you could create a Windows partition with Boot Camp and play the game on that.

Advantage: you'd likely experience better performance under Windows anyway.

Advantage: you have to reboot between operating systems, which creates a psychological barrier between work and play.

Disadvantage: there's no security layer per se between the two partitions, so if Steam led to some malware that indiscriminately corrupts data, it could reach your important work stuff on the Mac partition as well as the Windows partition.  Your IT department will likely not be happy with you.

For my case it is absolutely forbidden to make bootcamp as it would void the security of Mac per se you have to disable some build in security features to enable booting other OS, if you bootcamp from your internal drive - you have to disable encryption, if you want to bootcamp from external drive - you have to enable booting from external devices and again it is far bigger security issue than just having Steam running in MacOs.

 

[Cernwn]

You are going to need to run Steam WITH Administrative access to play. While you could run it as a portable app off a larger flash drive, corporate managed laptops are not known for allowing Admin access to end users. Best bet is to invest in a budget gaming laptop of your own. Personally I just launch Steam on my desktop, with a custom shortcut to minimize its bloatware footprint (replace with YOUR actual drive letter where Steam is installed):

"D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe" -no-browser +open steam://open/minigameslist

 

[push2drop]

Hi,

budget gaming laptop - choose any two... ok, in the current time of component scarcity, all options containing budget are out...

If the mac in question can still boot from a USB drive (and of course is still intel based - but that's a given it has been running 7d2d until lately), one could try to get a real fast one (SSD with either USB3 or Thunderbolt interface if that's still a thing on mac) and install Ubuntu with UEFI Boot partition on it (like this https://saytosid.github.io/ubuntuUSB/)

You can then install steam on Ubuntu and 7d2d with the usual Proton emulation layer.

You could of course try the same with Windows 10 but that is known to be quite finicky to actually get installed in a bootable way on an USB drive even on normal PCs, so not sure if it was done for mac (Nota bene, it's not the same as making a Win 10 installer stick and maybe getting that to boot and install on a mac).

Joachim

 

[Liesel Weppen]

If the mac in question can still boot from a USB drive  one could try to get a real fast one and install Ubuntu with UEFI Boot partition on it

What still does not prohibit access to the hard drives, so e.g. any malware can still read or encrypt them.

Can we now close this absolutely pointless thread, that just explains how to circumvent security applied by any employer or even how to use an unlicensed copy?

If you want to play games, either ask your employer if you are allowed to do that on company hardware or @%$#ing buy your own computer.

It's that simple.

 

[push2drop]

What still does not prohibit access to the hard drives, so e.g. any malware can still read or encrypt them.

Can we now close this absolutely pointless thread, that just explains how to circumvent security applied by any employer or even how to use an unlicensed copy?

Well, first of all, the amount of Linux malware is rather, erm, limited and also it is quite easy to make sure that the Linux from the stick does not mount the filesystems on the internal disks by itself or under the non-privileged account steam runs under (unlike on Win, steam on linux runs as a non-privileged user only and does not need administrative rights or granular capabilities for installing and executing games).

In general HFS+ (the filesystem macs run on) support on linux is a bit experimental, so by default HFS+ parttitions are going to be mounted read-only and  getting around that needs some commandline magic as root... so not going to happen by accident.

If you are really paranoid, you could of course go further to remove the HFS+ driver to make root jump through some more hoops or even to build and run a custom static kernel without the nvme and/or sata drivers.

Of course, running something not sanctioned on your employers hardware might still get you fired if found out (especially so when gaming at work). But doing so as described is probably less dangerous for the MacOS on there than opening a PDF or Office document from an untrusted source - which is far more probable to happen.