They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do.
But they didn’t, because they realized they didn’t have to. It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Steam Deck - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be. You copy it over, you wire it up to Steam, if it’s a non-Linux game you set it up with Proton or whatever else you want to use to run it, bam. You can now run it in Steam just as easily as a normal Steam game (usually.) If you want something similar to cloud saves you can even set up SyncThing for that.
But all of that is a lot of work, and after all that you still don’t have automatic updates, and some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or install stuff that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.) Some of this you can work around but it’s even more hoops.
Whereas if you own a game it’s just push a button and play. They made legitimately owning a game more convenient than piracy, and they did it without relying on DRM or anything that restricts or annoys legitimate users at all - even if a game has a DRM-free GOG version, owning it on Steam will still make it easier to play on the Steam Deck.
The steam deck is how you prevent piracy. If you look at the huge influx of streaming services, you’ll see an example of how you encourage piracy. I recently dropped three of my services in favor of one pirate site that has almost everything. They even offer a subscription tier and I’ve considered it. I’m willing to pay for good content. What I’m not willing to do is pay dozens of middlemen across multiple companies to rip off the people who actually make my favorite shows and then memory hole the shows a few months after they premiere.
Recently got a switch. Digital games are same price as physical, locked to my account/switch and saves don’t move easily between devices. Steam deck, I can play on any hardware that can support it TV, PC laptop games cloud save for free. I can play online games for free. I know that games I buy today will be available in 10 years on my next PC. I only buy carts for the switch cause they give me more flexibility still not even the same as steam.
It’s not the amount of services that’s the problem, the competition is aleays a good thing. It’s exclusives that are the problem. Almost noone is complaining about origin and uplay even thouhh it’s games are available via a launcher launching yet another launcher. But epic? Everyone hates epic precisely because of their exclusive deals taking content off of other platforms. And for streaming, I guess if some of the players worked out some deal to get their hands on exclusives from other platforms, people would stop complaining about it, even if they jack up the prices to ultimately end up with the same amount of revenue.
This was already proven at the height of Netflix, before streaming service hell.
It’s interesting you mention Apple because while I have every expectation that you’re correct at the moment, the iPod absolutely benefited from piracy. iTunes allowed you to add your own songs to your library to sync with the device, and iTunes could also be argued to have been on a similar model to Steam because you’d pay to ‘own’ the songs and there was no subscription giving you access to songs.
Then they started to remove songs you own, and songs from your hard drive that iTunes had nothing to do with it… Fucking apple cultists. You really never see any fault in your chosen god?
What? I’ve been using iPhones with pirated songs for 10+ years and never had this happen.
Genuinely curious, I know Apple does shit like that sometimes so I wouldn’t put it past them, but I’ve never seen happen or heard about this.
Is that a rhetorical question? I’ve had a few Apple products mostly in the past or issued to me from when, but I prefer android even when it can be disappointing to me sometimes. Was launching into nandroid via Haret when Windows Mobile devices were a thing too. I don’t prefer Apple stuff but whether it be sincere or perhaps theatrics, it seems like you’ve got an unnecessary and over aggressive revulsion towards them.
I just hope that steam stays good. it’s great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM
Let’s just hope for Gabe to live a long life still. Valve is a private company and not nearly as much in danger for enshittification as a public company would be.
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I literally stopped playing my pirated copy of Spider-Man Remastered to play an official copy on the Steam Deck because it was on sale.
Right, not to mention they also giving back to community by proposing game friendly changes on kernel AFAIK.
If just most games wold run on Linux out of box at least same as on Windows, i can imagine there would be shift in market share.
One of the reason is needless bloat of Windows so even my for-noobs-distro idles around 0% CPU and less the 1gb memory without doing almost any tweaking but Win10/11 constantly sends calls home and idles on 4-6GB of rams. Other thing is how lightning fast linux can be.Ram usage is really nothing to worry about depending on the amount you have. Windows will free ram where needed as long as there is enough. If ram is not being used by applications it will be used for other things (it will be cached I believe?). If almost no ram is being used it means some things might take longer to load.
Windows on my Surface Go 2 used about 3-4GB of ram when idle, while on my work laptop with 64GB ram it uses about 10-12GB. But if necessary applications can use some of that ram that’s normally being used in idle.
I do agree about Linux distros being faster, that’s my experience as well.
I believe Mac does this as well. If you have a lot of ram the os will use more ram as cache cause unused ram is wasted ram
Exactly, most, if not all, os’s do this.
Also they contribute loads to the Linux ecosystem so im happy to support them as I see it as a win/win . The sales are great too I spend like 50 ducats a year and get like 9 or 10 great games for that.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the best proof (that’s probably things like Spotify and Google Music, services which effectively killed any and all MP3 sharing).
But yeah, the Steam Deck is an awesome platform. It’s great to be able to carry games with you that you normally wouldn’t be able to play portable. It’s also an awesomely capable device for playing ROMS though, if you do decide to sail some seas :D
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Fair enough. Personally, I always stream music through YouTube Music. Never downloaded stuff because I don’t need to. I’ve got fast mobile internet with good coverage and I never really leave my city.
I’m not really into music enough to notice if things disappeared. Can’t say I’ve noticed that, but I’ve heard similar complaints from others. As long as there’s enough 80’s and 90’s bangers, I’m content :D
I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would’ve paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.
The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.
As someone who dropped put of business school to fix cars for a living, I feel this.
20$? That’s crazy talk. I barely buy AAA games today for that 😅
I’m a sucker for nostalgia.
to be fair plenty of older games hold up today in terms of gameplay if you don’t mind dated graphics (or if the game uses a timeless visual style). There are a few that I’d totally pay full price for a re-release simply because its hard to get them to run on modern systems.
Played the fug outta that game on PS3, kinda wanna play it again
Interesting take, for sure. I agree to some point. I also think Gabe just knows the audience, and he knows how much people would have rebelled against the very idea of this device if it came from Steam (not Valve), and excluded users. This would have been a completely failed product had the initial reviews been something like “Just a Switch knockoff”.
Instead, this has garnered Steam as a platform with an entire group of adoring fans, some of whom used to be critics. I guarantee they added a ton of business to Steam as a platform just because a lot of users would buy, say, GTA5 on Steam again during a sale for $9 versus jumping through the tiny hoops to make a bootleg copy run.
They did a fantastic job in parallelism getting Proton to an easy to use product (for free, mind you), and reinventing the portable PC game. Many may not know that was an entire segment of handheld PC devices on the market for years before Deck hit, and Steam’s team hit all the right spots to completely blow them away, and not only make them irrelevant, but also lure in new adoptees to Steam as a platform. Brilliant execution and moves.
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From context I get the impression that was a mistake and OP wrote Switch when they meant Deck. The rest of the paragraph seems to have pretty deck specific information.
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Piracy solutions can be made good too, though.
Can they?
I’m an indie game developer (3 years at current company). Here’s a brief summary of the anti-piracy/anti-cheat history we did -
- We noticed people were uploading old versions of our games on 3rd party app stores, so we introduced a feature that makes the game refuse to start if it’s on too old of a version
- When we later updated the minimum SDKs, and older devices couldn’t update, we had inadvertently remotely bricked a perfectly functional game on their device
- To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
- EVEN TODAY I spent multiple hours and an Uber to get my hands on a specific device that was having crash issues because whatever logs I could get remotely weren’t nearly suffice to debug an issue
- People were cheating Unity’s IAP store, so we installed a plugin that validated IAPs.
- IAPs took multiple more seconds to process, hurting legit buyers
- The cheating metrics went down, but because fewer people were buying IAPs, our rankings tanked on various ad networks
- Hackers were making modded clients, so we added obfuscation
- This made our builds much more harder to debug, and adds yet another step in our build pipeline
- Users were editing values in memory to give themselves more levels and beat the leaderboard
- We manually banned them from the leaderboard. It takes like 5 seconds and happens once a week, not a big deal
- Users were editing values in memory for more coins
- It doesn’t affect us in any way, at this point we stopped caring
Given enough resources anything can be done. I didn’t say it was gonna be easy. But I gotta say, probably easier to make “cracked” movies convenient than games.
To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
Why didn’t you just encrypt your logs, and make your company the only one to have the key to actually read it? Or is there a risk of someone reading the data in memory before it gets encrypted and written to disk?
- We noticed people were uploading old versions of our games on 3rd party app stores, so we introduced a feature that makes the game refuse to start if it’s on too old of a version
Well if someone is out there doing it for free, isn’t it silly that some are demanding money and doing all kinds of extra work to lock things down?
You don’t gotta pay me to dance, but I put on a better show than any trained ballerina.
They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.
I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it’s still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam’s servers for cloud saves.
(The fact that it’s hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I’ve absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)
The new oled is so good. Its a night and day difference in sdr and hdr. Worth it.
At the end it’s all about convenience and how much you need to tinker with something, because your free time also matters and if the effort to pirate something is higher than the price of that something then you are more likely to choose convenience. Same with Netflix.
I generally always buy games, because they are kinda cheap on PC, but I still refuse to pay streaming services to watch movies.
Steam Deck is great for consuming movies / TV series.
Every game I’ve pirated I eventually purchased, but I stopped when steam had their 2h playtime return window.
