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I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue." (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Yglorba@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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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[-] mateomaui@reddthat.com 2 points 2 years ago

I don’t even own a steamdeck yet but most of my actual purchases are from Steam in preparation for the next big revision. Buy Steam cheap from keyshops, pirate GOG for backup.

[-] firecat@kbin.social 2 points 2 years 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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[-] sunflower_name@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, valve is pretty much one of the least companies, that let you own your games, not rent for a couple of years for $100

[-] babydriver@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

They still put drm in the games sold on their store though.

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[-] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I love my Steam Deck. The fact that Valve made it so easy to upgrade, mod, repair, and running a full Linux distro so I can install anything on it is just awesome.

I've convinced 2 friends so far to buy one, so Valve is getting hella value from me on that front lol.

It's so nice that it just works with any controllers, any hardware, can be fully customized internally and externally.

I use it to watch TV and movies, stream my Jellyfin music, couch co-op, play my emulated GBA games, play FOSS games like Battle for Wesnoth and Super Tux Kart, and of course a bunch of my Steam games.

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