How do you deal with Windows SmartScreen?

Unity Engine
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1

I’ve just started distributing my game to testers and have run into the SmartScreen issue. For those who don’t know, this is where Windows Defender blocks your game from running and doesn’t make it obvious how to bypass this block.

I’ve done some research and found a lot of conflicting information. It seems like until recently an EV certificate was the way to completely bypass this warning, but apparently Microsoft changed this recently and now an EV certificate is not enough to prevent SmartScreen from blocking your game.

The general consensus seems to be that you just have to wait it out until your have enough downloads/time/usage for Windows to trust your game, but I’m wondering:

  1. Is there anything you can do to speed this up?
  2. Is there anything you can do to make the SmartScreen message less scary and make it easier for users to bypass the block?
  3. Once your game does become trusted, will updating it cause it to become untrusted again?

There’s a lot of old information on this topic, I’d like to hear if anyone has more up to date info and experiences with this.

2

No. If there would be such an option it would get exploited. So no, users have to click on “more info” in order to “allow anyway”.

I can only speak from experience. I rarely encounter this SmartScreen popup. When it does, it’s because I’m trying to run an executable that I manually unpacked under Downloads.

I may be wrong but it’s my impression that distributing the application a) with a verified installer and b) through a trusted source and possibly c) by signing the application and applying the necessary steps to incorporate that signature in the app or update the signature in the cloud. Any or all of these seem to prevent the SmartScreen popup.

In my experience, SmartScreen only pops up when a developer makes a build and distributes it directly to me, via his own website or repository. It never happened to me trying to run an installer as far as I recall. And it will definitely not happen when you distribute your app through Steam - which does allow for closed beta channels and so forth. And there are other betatest distribution services much like they exist for mobile (TestFlight).

3

Thanks for that info. I looked into the Steam route and that looks promising - didn’t realize you could have a private Playtest product on Steam before release.