Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

I think steam in general is a proof that its a service issue

The deck has made me more likely to buy a game on steam because of how easy it is.

Don't even need Steam deck. The Steam store has put an end to my pirate life over a decade ago.

On multiple occasions, I have found myself rather wait for sale and bought a game on Steam, than receive it for free on Epic store.

I put every single games that I have ever pirated in Steam's wishlist (if it's available). Then slowly buying them one by one when they goes on sale. I'm not rich by any means and it's the least I can do.

I just hope that steam stays good. it's great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM

Speaking of services, I wonder how much piracy would go down if Netflix and Disney Plus and such would let you rent a film or episode at £0.50-£2 at a time for 24 hours, like how Google Play used to let you. That way if you don't own one of the subscriptions, you can still watch by paying pocket change. Or watch unlimited by paying the monthly fee.

I actually bought some games on Steam I already owned on other launchers because while I could set them up via Lutris or the like just hitting "Play" is so much easier it's unreal. Valve is doing so much to make Linux game as comfortable as possible I don't even remotely consider buying from anyone else because there it's a pain in the ass just to get the game running once, never mind keeping it running through updates

Well, I stopped pirating games a long ago because of steam, because of how good it was/is as a service and low prices. I don't think any game publisher should cry about steam prices, because when the AAA game is just released and for a full price, millions of FOMOs run to buy it. And I can wait and see if it's worth it.

that's why i use spotify, almost all songs i want, great UI, the discovery algorithm is rad, and sharing a playlist for the communal work speaker is easy.

I buy most of my games on steam simply because it makes running them on Linux so damn easy, and I remember the bad old days when it was 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.

This was already proven at the height of Netflix, before streaming service hell.

they did it without relying on DRM

Steam itself has some kind of DRM. You need to login to Steam to access the games you bought (sure there's offline mode but then you can't download your games, update or buy more, so it's only temporary convenience). If Steam dies one day, so will your Steam games library.
However, the service is great, so it's not annoying.