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

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.

memory hole

sick turn of phrase, i'm stealing that

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.

The steam deck does nothing to prevent piracy though? It’s just a portable pc. Nothing about it is making pc gaming any more enticing to make people stop pirating.

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.

It’s funny. I’m dirt poor and I really want to play The Last of Us again. I could easily download it and get it going through piracy. Heck, it’s crossed my mind a time or two.

But you know what I’m doing? I’m waiting for it to go on sale and I’ll grab it then if the time is right. If not I’ll wait until it is.

I have plenty to do until then.

It’s definitely a service issue. I haven’t pirated a single game on Steam Deck.

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.

I've been doing this exact thing!! and it's refreshing to see this attitude on Lemmy, which generally seems to really really hate giving the creators of the content they consume any money. People here act like they're entitled to free content and piracy is some moral obligation. Piracy is and should be just a little bit shameful. it's not like it's evil or whatever but you're not supposed to be proud of doing it. I pay for the content i spend the most time with whenever I'm financially comfortable enough to do it.

I can't even remember the last time I pirated a game. Probably over a decade?

I might have to pirate a game from the Wii U though they they won't remake for the switch:(

This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn't do anything wrong on my end).

These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That's an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it's not available DRM-free, it's ethically justifiable to pirate.

It’s ok for anyone except those who live in a unpopular country. Valve just doesn’t care about latin America and others. You legally can’t buy games, the prices are ridiculous.

Valve doesn’t care about you, doesn’t care about gaming and is only interested in money.

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 would love to see a chart with my steam purchases over the years. There would be a huge spike up as soon as my deck arrived.

The deck has made me highly interested in building a desktop for the first time in a long time, running Chimera OS. I didn't realize something like the deck was possible, and I'd just dock it if it were more powerful, but it doesn't need to be more powerful as a handheld. I'd love a high end gaming PC that is able to park in the living room and function just fine with my dualsense controller. Prices have mostly come down, so I've window shopped a solid build for about $1200, but the GPU alone would've been about that much until pretty recently.

Not to mention keeping game saves in sync. I’m experimenting with syncthing for my pirated games, but I have to admit that just getting the Steam version sounds much more sensible now that I’ve my Steam deck.

Let's just hope for Gabe to live a long life still. Valve is a private company and not nearly as much in danger for enshittification as a public company would be.

Then they started to remove songs you own, and songs from your hard drive that iTunes had nothing to do with it... Fucking apple cultists. You really never see any fault in your chosen god?

Then again, music streaming services pretty much removed music piracy from mainstream usage altogether. Obviously people in this sub still pirate music, but it's so uncommon nowadays, I'm sure many people wouldn't even know where or how to find it.

That is absolutely not correct.

Steam policy is if valve shuts it down, they'll give you enough time to download all the games and run them without drm.

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.

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.

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.)

It's optional for devs so plenty of games don't use it at all

*only the games you didnt download

Obviously you would need to be in online mode to download something. That's how the Internet works.

If just most games wold run on Linux out of box at least same as on Windows, i can imagine there would be shift in market share.

You could argue that this is somewhat true by looking at the protondb numbers for the top 1000 games. 88% of the games are silver rated or better and the majority of those 12% games are competitive multiplayer titles with weird/invasive anti cheats.

Ram usage is really nothing to worry about depending on the amount you have. Windows will free ram where needed as long as there is enough. If ram is not being used by applications it will be used for other things (it will be cached I believe?). If almost no ram is being used it means some things might take longer to load.

Windows on my Surface Go 2 used about 3-4GB of ram when idle, while on my work laptop with 64GB ram it uses about 10-12GB. But if necessary applications can use some of that ram that's normally being used in idle.

I do agree about Linux distros being faster, that's my experience as well.

The sales are shit and have been for years.

The price of PC getting popular I guess.

Mega Man Battle Network does not require internet to run, it only requires internet for the multiplayer. Which is dead anyway

As someone who dropped put of business school to fix cars for a living, I feel this.

Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005)

Man, I loved that game. It was the last NFS I played, everything after that sucked donkey balls and required an Origin installation.
Any tips on how you got it to run? I have the ElAmigos release and I think I tried it once but didn't have any success on the Deck.

20$? That's crazy talk. I barely buy AAA games today for that 😅

Played the fug outta that game on PS3, kinda wanna play it again

I really like steam but I don't use it exclusively and I wouldn't recommend doing so.

I shop around and I own many games on GOG in particular, which is DRM free and also convenient in its own way. They provide installers for games so your library is truly independent, and I have used Lutris and Minigalaxy to get those games running on Linux (with Proton) including on the Deck

Steam is great but it is basically DRM and not the be all and end all of gaming. Competition is good for everyone and I will generally try and buy from GOG if the price is the same or even if it's slightly higher because I truly own my game data. That has a value in itself.

For me, Steam is the go-to proof.
Obviously different experiences, but Spotify's refusal to do hi rez and the fact some music dissappears randomly (not their fault tbf) makes me want to pirate my library.

man I remember using a 8" windows tablet with a 3d printed mount to a xbox controller to be able to play steam games like hyperlight drifter, it was so cool at the time but man did it suck holding it for long and the performance was so bad for anything but the simplest game. after that I turned to steam link with my phone and a razer kishi controller, I setup a headless steam docker on my server to keep my games accessible and that worked pretty well when 5G came out but nothing really beats games running on the hardware you hold in your hand, at least not for a good while

Think op means the steam deck, not switch.

I think OP accidentally wrote Switch instead of Steamdeck

There’s definitely a soft mod, but I’m assuming you’re talking about newer switches

By now Steam's most loyal userbase is probably the Linux Gaming community because they make it so easy to just play the games, not to mention the QoL improvements they contribute to upstream projects

Every game I've pirated I eventually purchased, but I stopped when steam had their 2h playtime return window.

I can’t think of a worse mobile device to use for movie/tv watching than a steam deck 😂. Your phone would be much better.

I pretty much do the same for almost a decade whenever a game doesn't have a demo available

Well if someone is out there doing it for free, isn't it silly that some are demanding money and doing all kinds of extra work to lock things down?

You don't gotta pay me to dance, but I put on a better show than any trained ballerina.

Can they?

I'm an indie game developer (3 years at current company). Here's a brief summary of the anti-piracy/anti-cheat history we did -

• We noticed people were uploading old versions of our games on 3rd party app stores, so we introduced a feature that makes the game refuse to start if it's on too old of a version
  • When we later updated the minimum SDKs, and older devices couldn't update, we had inadvertently remotely bricked a perfectly functional game on their device
• To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
  • EVEN TODAY I spent multiple hours and an Uber to get my hands on a specific device that was having crash issues because whatever logs I could get remotely weren't nearly suffice to debug an issue
• People were cheating Unity's IAP store, so we installed a plugin that validated IAPs.
  • IAPs took multiple more seconds to process, hurting legit buyers
  • The cheating metrics went down, but because fewer people were buying IAPs, our rankings tanked on various ad networks
• Hackers were making modded clients, so we added obfuscation
  • This made our builds much more harder to debug, and adds yet another step in our build pipeline
• Users were editing values in memory to give themselves more levels and beat the leaderboard
  • We manually banned them from the leaderboard. It takes like 5 seconds and happens once a week, not a big deal
• Users were editing values in memory for more coins
  • It doesn't affect us in any way, at this point we stopped caring

They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.

I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it's still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam's servers for cloud saves.

(The fact that it's hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I've absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)