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.
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.
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.
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.
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.Yeah. What I mean is that the Steam Deck itself doesn't add anything special in that regard to fight piracy.
(Plus, I mean, Steam's base DRM is like a screen door or a "please do not pirate" sign, lol. If Steam dies one day, Steam DRM won't be a problem because you can basically crack it by breathing on it too hard. I assume that is purpose is to ensure that you have to violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions to pirate their games, not to actually slow down pirates at this point.)
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.
Not to say that Steam doesn't have some tremendous issues on this front (it does), but I truly wish more companies understood this. If you let me play / listen / watch your thing on whatever device I choose, for a reasonable one-time price, in perpetuity, I will pay that price.
Ten bucks for a Witcher season? Sure. A fiver for the latest season of Glup Shitto's Starred War Adventure? Yeah, I'm in. I'm not gonna pay $180 a year to five different companies each to watch six or seven new maybe great but probably mid TV shows.
Same goes for games. I'm not paying $80 plus a $40 battle pass every year to play Call of Duty 2: 3: War Crimes Boogaloo, Part 5. I'm just gonna steal your shit. I will not feel bad about it in the slightest.
I just hope that steam stays good. it's great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM
I think you meant to say "Deck" in the second paragraph.
But yeah I totally vibe with your observation. Something a bit ironic with this situation is that a big part of why other companies simply can't provide the kind of service Steam does is copyright issues - XBox and Playstation both give out free games, Nintendo has their online service, but no option remotely compares to "make everything available on one app on the most modern device." Imagine if Nintendo put everything that had ever appeared on the Wii/DS/Wii U/3DS/Switch shops all on one online storefront on the Switch, and let you attach ownership to your account and play everything you owned on the most recent device - then they would have about a quarter of the functionality that Steam has on the Deck, where you have access to every game you've bought for PC for as long as Steam has existed (and quite a few things from before that) and the number of things that have lost compatibility is pretty low.
In my personal life, I run Linux on all my devices and I would never invest in non-opensource technology for my career. (Work forces me to run macOS, but that's another story).
For years now, I happily and only buy games on Steam, even if I have the choice between Steam and NoDRM. Simply because Steam just works(TM) and is convenient. (Of course one never buys games on steam with a forced additional starter from Ubisoft etc.).
Steam is really great from a technically POV, from a giving back to the community point and from a customer friendliness point (never had a problem with a return).
I even bought a SteamDeck although I am no big fan of handhelds, and for what it is, it is great.
I'll happily waste more money on my Steam backlog of shame. ;-)
It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Switch - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be.
I wish it was that easy! So far, the only way I know of is a hardmod, which already DQs for any remotely sensible form of DIY, and means a very real possibility of turning the Switch into a fancy paperweight.
Games are one of the very few things that I always pay for. Steam is mostly responsible for that. Also, music. But nowadays I do store some of my own music because I can have lossless that way.
It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the
SwitchSteam Deck - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be.Hacking or cracking DRM takes time, but it doesn't present a real obstacle for pirates to overcome.
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.
Android is built on linux yet it is increasingly locked down and many phones are extremely difficult to get root access on.
So Valve could have followed the phone ecosystem path and pushed as much of the feature set as proprietary code as possible (binary blob drivers, proton proprietary instead of bsd), replaced pacman with a valve controlled package manager & repos, setup selinux to give users no power to do anything and made the deck only able to secure boot steamOS signed by Valve. Technical users may be able to jail break such a device but the majority would not be inclined to.
Valve's wisdom here is in realizing that the majority are going to buy their games anyway but if you don't lock the device down then most of the technical users will also buy most of their games whereas if you have to go out of your way to jail break a device to install something fun then that device basically becomes a piracy only device from that point on.
I only run legit games on my handheld Linux computer. You're right, a user like me could most certainly install games some other way but there's no point putting in all this effort since I can just joink it from my years old steam account and be very happy in the process.
