1495
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Yglorba@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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[-] PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

Its really just because Gabe is the dude.

It would devolve of he died.

[-] CountVon@sh.itjust.works 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm not convinced that Valve will go down the tubes when Gabe shuffles off this moral coil (praise gaben may he live a thousand years). It would require a strong company culture that believes as he does that piracy is a service issue and is thus willing to adhere to his vision in his absence, but that can happen in a privately held company if there's a strong succession plan in place.

Now, if Gabe dies and Valve goes public, then it's pretty much over. Platform monetization, proft-taking and short-term thinking would enshittify Steam in short order.

[-] Coasting0942@reddthat.com 8 points 11 months ago

Damn I hope they become a worker collective.

“We just care about providing for our employees, keeping the servers running, and stashing away a percentage in a rainy day fund”. Employees having debate on whether to hire a translator or build a breastfeeding room this year. Some saying why not both?

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Came looking for this.

Get rid of Gabe and put in the Unity board, and we'll be paying extra for every Mb we download...

Oh boy. Dont give them ideas.

[-] objectionist@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

trust me, the people who work at valve right now know better than to make those stupid ass decisions

[-] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Some game developer - oh, our shitty update process requires the whole game to be downloaded again and not just the patch? Too bad so sad!

this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
1495 points (98.1% liked)

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