Steam Achievements WITHOUT triggering Windows Firewall popup

[toomuchabstracti]

I followed this tutorial for setting up Steam achievements:

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I’ve made a video that gets straight to the point if you don’t want to read all of that: https://youtu.be/4JSirvmjOb0 (Same tutorial but on reddit: Reddit - Dive into anything) This tutorial doesn’t require any paid plugins, it only covers simple and INTEGER progressive achievements. It works in UE5 and recent UE4 versions. If you want to add the achievements of your own game it must be accepted by steam and changes must be published. If it isn’t, you can still follow a part of this tutorial …

And it worked. However, now when I try to launch a packaged build, I get a Windows Firewall popup. This previously did not happen. I’m using a Shipping build configuration. I suspect that the problem is that this method for doing Steam achievements requires enabling various “Online” plugins (e.g. “Online Base”, “Online Subsystem”, “Online Subsystem Steam”, etc), and that for some reason, one of those plugins is attempting to open a network port on launch. Does anyone know a) if this is the case, and b) if so, how to stop it?

My game has no networking requirements, I just need to be able to talk to the local Steam client process so that I can tell it when an achievement has been hit. I need to not have the firewall popup when new players launch the game, it undermines my credibility and makes players think the game is spying on them.

Thank you in advance!