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.
Recently got a switch. Digital games are same price as physical, locked to my account/switch and saves don’t move easily between devices. Steam deck, I can play on any hardware that can support it TV, PC laptop games cloud save for free. I can play online games for free. I know that games I buy today will be available in 10 years on my next PC. I only buy carts for the switch cause they give me more flexibility still not even the same as steam.
I very rarely backup game saves but only the thought of being locked to a console puts me off. I can’t possibly invest 100+ hours in a Pokemon game and lose everything of the battery dies, screen breaks, console is forgotten on a bus or stolen, and so on.
Switch save files can be saved in the cloud, but the game devs have to enable it. You can also save them to an SD card.
Saved in the cloud if youre a NSO subscriber* Aint paying for the sub? Tough luck kid.
Except for Pokémon games which are saved directly to the internal storage and unable to be moved unless you have the original save device (and it’s working) as well as the new device and transfer the save manually.
Splatoon is the same. Saves are locked to the system, even with NSO.
Animal crossing was the same until people raised hell about it.
I think steam in general is a proof that its a service issue
Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn’t use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don’t have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.
Valve is not publicly owned, I don’t think you can equate commerce to Capitalism.
Commerce conducted in a capitalist economy is inherently capitalist. Being publicly traded is not strictly required, though it might be the most common form of corporate structure under capitalism. Individuals, partnerships, privately-held and publicly-traded companies can all own capital. Valve’s assets are not owned by a government, its business decisions are made privately and it operates in a free market. Those three factors are pretty much the definition of capitalism.
Valve argued in court that you do not own any title in your library and that they are a subscription based service. That’s not very ethical.
Is that not true though? As much as we hate it, until you get given some transferrable proof of ownership of the game (like an NFT) and ability to play without being tied to one service, it’s the unfortunate reality of online game services.
It’s easy to go buy a physical game but when it’s online, you don’t own anything - yet
Fundamentally I don’t really know how it’d be viable to truly “own” a specific copy of something, when it’s always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such “ownership” is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.
So instead my personal take is that I’d rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don’t necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.
NFTs cannot have copies made (apart from by the publisher) and are ideally suited to this problem
But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.
The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be “official” instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies…but that’s using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from “lol copyright”, legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.
You’re talking about media linked to by existing NFTs. You can’t copy an NFT and use it, you don’t have the cryptographic keys to mint more. There is a finite number.
It’s true. Pragmatically speaking if you don’t have access to the server software you can’t play it if the servers go down, and besides reverse engineering or the goodwill of the developers I’m not aware of any games with online components that continue to be playable after their servers are taken down.
Well then allow me to name a few:
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Battlefront 2 (the original), still active when the servers have been down for years
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Titanfall 2. Official servers aren’t technically down, but pretty much unusable and NorthStar is the alternative
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Counter strike 1.6 is pretty much just community-run servers, same with day of defeat: source. I don’t know if they are tied with valve that if valve shut them down, they wouldn’t be searchable.
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Supreme commander: Forged Alliance
Hell, Battle for Middle Earth II still has a small community
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Valheim has never had official servers. I run my own via docker on debian
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Unreal Tournament 1999
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Minecraft (official servers aren’t down, but if they shutdown there would still be 2000 servers)
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Back in 2000-2012, a good lot of mainly singleplayer games had optional multiplayer modes. Think Halo, Starcraft, TRON, Titanfall, etc. Even DOOM 2016 had it. These games function with the servers down.
Something I haven’t thought about in a while: In the early 2000s games where you made a direct connection to the other player without an intervening, third-party server were still a thing. You still see it in things like netplay functionality in emulators.
Is this still a thing at all in 2023? Imagine it would be very niche, but this comment made me curious.
It’s still in Team Fortress 2 and Factorio
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.
It is as simple as providing a service that has all content I want to watch. Look at things like Spotify or Apple Music. They don’t have everything, but it’s enough and has effectively stopped my pirating music.
Same with Netflix. It stopped me pirating because of the convenience, but since everything got separated in its own service again, I started up my own plex server. I’m not jumping through a million hoops to watch a stupid show or film…
Vudu, Amazon, and iTunes have renting capabilities.
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
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.
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.
It mostly stopped piracy for me, but occasionally I’ll want to try a game but not want to support the company, or try a game I know I’ll hate just to see what they did.
I also pirated Starfield, which I technically had access to through GamePass, but it couldn’t be modded. (I also ended up hating it too.) I’ll probably be canceling GamePass though since I’ve switched to 100% Linux since then, and Windows has made it impossible to use with Linux.
Can you play “Windows only” Steam games on Linux?
Probably a stupid question, sorry.
Super broad generalization, yes.
That’s one of the biggest things valve has contributed to for the Linux community, unshitifying gaming on Linux. Proton does an amazingly good job at working on most games. And steam does a great job of making it easier to use proton.
Now there are always a few problem games, mainly ones that use some crazy kernel level anti-cheat (that doesn’t work anyways). But if you’re curious look at https://www.protondb.com/
Yeah, so like everyone else has said, generally yes. There are occasionally issues, but the only issues I’ve had so far (that see actually issues with the game running and not anti-cheat that just blocks Linux) have been solved by fixes I found on ProtonDB.
Apparently, on average, games actually run even better on Linux. This is due to the combination of a less bloated OS, but also because proton is translating DirectX into Vulkan, and doing it a smart way such that it’s actually more efficient usually. So far, it’s only GamePass and those few multiplayer games that have fallen short.
Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We’re talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.
I tried Commandos (released in 1998) the other day. It worked nearly flawlessly. I still needed to set my bottle (application for running wine/proton with presets) to run in an older version of Windows compatibility mode I think, but you need to do that in Windows probably too.
(You do need a fan patch to make it run at modern resolutions, but that’s not required, and it’s needed for windows too.)
The deck has made me more likely to buy a game on steam because of how easy it is.
Seamlessly syncing game saves between my Deck and my primary gaming PC is so nice. Before I travel I just make sure to wake up the deck long enough to get updates and sync saves.
For non steam games I use syncthing but that always requires just a little bit of work.
I just hope that steam stays good. it’s great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM
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.
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.
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.
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?
