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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 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.)

A lot of this is just easier to do from legit steam setup, not impossible. I don't usually pirate games (I want to support devs making things playable on Linux when I buy from Steam or making DRM-free stuff when I buy from Gog). But I do have a lot of stuff that I run outside of steam in plain old wine without proton or wine-wrapper tools like lutris. I haven't come across many games that I have on Gog that you can't run in wine itself but I will agree that it is sometimes a lot more work. I'm also on a desktop PC using Linux, so not completely the same as a steam deck but runtime-wise it should be pretty darn close.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

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