This is the weird, sentimental attitude that has me buried in clutter

I don't think it can be considered malware unless its doing something malicious that you don't expect. I don't want or need it on my system, but people who want to play these multiplayer games have a valid use-case and can make that decision themselves.

Of course, you may have just intended to snarky and I'm just being tedious.

what the fuck are you talking about

many such cases

That hasn't been the case for a while now. It also never truly mattered, the code is available for you to modify.

Man, I've been a programmer for over a decade now and my eyes still glaze over when I read regex.