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.

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[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] oce@jlai.lu 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Steam DRM is trivial to circumvent, it's basically cheap locks screwed onto the game with security torx, not even riveted: If you have a toolbelt you're already in and every skiddie with half a brain cell can do it as Valve doesn't bother defeating the scripts that are floating around.

What it does prevent is random tech-illiterate people copying game files to their friend's box.

If Steam dies one day then my library would be largely lost, yes, but not due to DRM but because most of my library isn't actually on my disk.

[–] Kittenstix@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like if Steam dies we're in some kind of end of the world scenario anyway so there probably wouldn't be time to game anymore.

[–] isles@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Or maybe exclusively time to game as we live in our caves waiting for the fallout to settle. How many watts is a potato?

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[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The sales are shit and have been for years.

The price of PC getting popular I guess.

[–] fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ever tried to buy a game on a console?

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[–] InterSynth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, precisely because piracy is a service issue, Turkey and Argentina are going to turn to piracy again, after Valve fucked them over.

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[–] linuxdweeb@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's built on Linux. Specifically Arch Linux. So no, there's nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy. Not even if they wanted to.

[–] 520@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s built on Linux.

So what? Orbis (the PlayStation OS) is built on FreeBSD, but there's still anti piracy on the PS5.

So no, there’s nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy.

They could have:

locked the machine to SteamOS only
allowed only the Steam UI
encrypted the SSD using a TPM chip to prevent messing with the OS.
disallow applications that expose the underlying UI
have an Apple esque signing policy when it comes to system binaries
not allow custom shortcuts.
much more

Believe me, if they wanted to try, they could have.

[–] AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You got me there. Doing stuff like that on other platforms like the Switch totally prevented piracy, so I suppose it's a good thing they didn't do it on a system that thousands of devs know down to the kernel without having to reverse engineer.

[–] Zorque@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago

You said prevent, not eliminate. There's tens of thousands of ways to prevent piracy. They are not infallible, but they are preventatives.

There is nothing on this earth that will eliminate piracy.

Where would you like to move the goalposts now?

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de -1 points 1 year ago

And if you want both piracy and the convenience of Steam, there are always key resellers.

[–] firecat@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago

Well that’s completely untrue, the operating system is not open source, steamOS should be open source and Valve refuses to do it.

Your opinion on gaming is irrelevant because Proton is another software and Valve employees don’t contribute to the code, GitHub records show zero activity from them. Some games don’t even work.

Steam Deck/ Valve don’t support piracy, the User Agreement you signed up to obtain Steam Deck says by default it doesn’t support piracy.

They didn’t make games easier to buy. You still need the Client, you still need to sign up, you can’t sue Valve, you will get banned if the key is illegal and obtaining games that’s not American or Europe is super hard.

Valve just selling a junk machine with their brand. Nothing special about it.

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