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

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.

KpntAutismus,

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.

drunkensailor, (edited )
@drunkensailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

Katiria24,

I’m excitedly waiting for my OLED to arrive

Rin,

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.

HiddenLayer5,
@HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Doing the absolute bare minimum to not be consumer hostile does not warrant praise. Just because Nintendo or Apple are worse doesn’t mean Valve is heroic for not doing things they really shouldn’t have the right to do anyway.

BarterClub,

The new oled is so good. Its a night and day difference in sdr and hdr. Worth it.

InterSynth,
@InterSynth@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yeah, precisely because piracy is a service issue, Turkey and Argentina are going to turn to piracy again, after Valve fucked them over.

Thordros,
@Thordros@hexbear.net avatar

You can hardly blame Valve for a country’s currency collapsing.

Marzepansion, (edited )

I’m a game dev, so my perspective on this can be biased, but my honest opinion is if games are too expensive for you to buy, go pirate them. That’s exactly the situation places like Argentina are in now. Let us westerners subsidize the cost of development until your country gets back on track and you are able to buy more than just staple goods (40% of Argentina is considered living in poverty or worse).

This goes for people in poverty anywhere in the world tbh even in the West. Piracy doesn’t really move the needle much (but do try to support indie devs if you can)

Facebones,

Also, a lot of devs ask that you just pirate VS buying from Grey markets like G2A. It’s a PITA dealing with charge backs and shit.

DingoBilly,

I disagree. You don’t seem to understand piracy at all.

If you’re going to pirate games, you’ll find a way. I have spent hours sometimes figuring out how to do so, and it’s almost part of the fun.

The only reason I’d look at buying a Steam deck in future is to play pirated games. If I absolutely love a game and developer then sure, I’d buy it if I have the cash but otherwise you may as well pirate it.

The only reason I don’t pirate games IS because of locked down hardware like Playstation Etc. Otherwise, I have pretty much never bought a game on PC.

bitwolf,

I was playing MegaMan Battle Neckwork and Tony Hawks pro Skater using emu deck for almost a year.

When both dropped on Steam I bought both. Unfortunately MegaMan Battle Network requires Internet to run so I reverted back to the emulators.

Tony Hawk is a wonderful port however.

HawlSera,

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

bitwolf, (edited )

Hmm, I just tried to open it on the plane and it asked me to connect to the Internet.

I’ll have to try again. Did you put steam into offline mode prior?

HawlSera,

I know that I’ve played it during internet outages, which is fucking ironic considering it’s an internet themed RPG

FinishingDutch,
@FinishingDutch@lemmy.world avatar

I wouldn’t necessarily say the best proof (that’s probably things like Spotify and Google Music, services which effectively killed any and all MP3 sharing).

But yeah, the Steam Deck is an awesome platform. It’s great to be able to carry games with you that you normally wouldn’t be able to play portable. It’s also an awesomely capable device for playing ROMS though, if you do decide to sail some seas :D

filcuk, (edited )

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.

kadu,
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    FinishingDutch,
    @FinishingDutch@lemmy.world avatar

    Fair enough. Personally, I always stream music through YouTube Music. Never downloaded stuff because I don’t need to. I’ve got fast mobile internet with good coverage and I never really leave my city.

    I’m not really into music enough to notice if things disappeared. Can’t say I’ve noticed that, but I’ve heard similar complaints from others. As long as there’s enough 80’s and 90’s bangers, I’m content :D

    Lemmchen,

    Also, slowly, their catalogues are removing some tracks due to licensing issues and I’ve already lost 20 songs from my library.

    Honestly, this is what will eventually bring me to abandon Spotify. It sucks so hard not being able to listen to that one weird niche song you stumbled upon, but instantly fell in love with. And they never tell you “Hey, our license for this song is running out in six weeks and we won’t renew it. Better listen to it again while it lasts.”.
    I wish I could just buy all the songs I favorited on Spotify and not have to deal with any of this absolute nonsense.

    At the same time their recommendation engine is extremely good and that’s what makes it hard to abandon Spotify completely for me.

    pseudonym,

    I’m going to get downvoted to hell for half but as a long time Spotify user, I switched to YouTube music last year because of the recommendations. I guess it depends on what it listen to, but I found that Spotify if I listened to one thing for a while and then wanted to go back to what I was listening to a couple months ago, all my recommendations were the new thing, like they decided I just didn’t like the old thing anymore 🙁

    Sarcasmo220, (edited )

    If you want to try some niche music service there is resonate.coop which encourages exploration by making it cheap to listen to a song once. However, if you like the song and keep going back to it it will be considered “purchased” and you will no longer be charged when you listen to it. Last I checked there was no offline mode for purchased songs but they were working on it.

    Lipriv30,

    Link is broken.

    squaresinger,

    And if you want both piracy and the convenience of Steam, there are always key resellers.

    linuxdweeb,

    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.

    BewilderedBeast,
    @BewilderedBeast@mander.xyz avatar

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

    madcaesar,

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

    linuxdweeb,

    I’m a sucker for nostalgia.

    CheeseNoodle, (edited )

    to be fair plenty of older games hold up today in terms of gameplay if you don’t mind dated graphics (or if the game uses a timeless visual style). There are a few that I’d totally pay full price for a re-release simply because its hard to get them to run on modern systems.

    Lemmchen,

    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.

    cujo,

    Following if you get any info, I loved that game

    mellejwz,

    I seem to remember that Carbon also doesn’t need Origin, or am I wrong? I also think that it was awesome.

    linuxdweeb,

    I don’t remember all the steps I had to do, but I do remember it being a pain in the ass. I downloaded the black edition from myabandonware.com and installed a widescreen mod (which messed up the UI since some elements were slightly offscreen, but it didn’t bother me).

    Besides that, the only other annoyance was the controls. There are actually a lot of community layouts for this game, but the ones I ended up using were a pain when navigating the menus. You’ll definitely want to try a few.

    FWIW, here are my current working launch settings for it:

    • Proton 8.0-4
    • Launch Options: WINEDLLOVERRIDES=“dinput8=n,b” %command%

    So I guess if you get past the installer, those should get it to launch.

    xan1242,
    @xan1242@lemmy.ml avatar

    You are correct! You have to put the dinput8 overrides for the plugin (ASI) loader so that the widescreen fix and other stuff can load. (This is the same for all Black Box NFS games basically)

    Also, if you’re installing from the original media, you have to update it to 1.3 and then put the no cd patch. In this case I can only recommend the MrDJ repack because it does this already.

    However, I highly recommend updating the WS fix and checking out now and then for updates because we do still maintain and develop it. (Not very often but hey, life is life)

    That being said, I am also working on improving another plugin of mine, called XtendedInput, which brings native XInput to the game. I’ve already tested it with the Steam Controller and it works nicely. It’s currently a bit fiddly for MW because I hadn’t implemented ingame configuration, so you do have to edit ini files for custom maps and deadzones. (Hopefully I will someday, right now I am stuck on other stuff)

    linuxdweeb,

    Oh shit, you’re actually a modder! Thanks for helping to keep these old games alive, and keep up the good work!!

    xan1242,
    @xan1242@lemmy.ml avatar

    You’re welcome! :)

    I’ll try to make sure it works on Linux too!

    Secret300,

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

    BaardFigur,

    Piracy solutions can be made good too, though.

    Mango,

    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.

    Yglorba, (edited )

    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.)

    OsrsNeedsF2P,

    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
    ICastFist,
    @ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

    For any game with online components, the “ideal” way to combat piracy or cheating is with leaving as much stuff on the server side as possible, not unlike an MMO. Anything left to client side validation will be hacked.

    greenmarty,

    Right, not to mention they also giving back to community by proposing game friendly changes on kernel AFAIK.

    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.
    One of the reason is needless bloat of Windows so even my for-noobs-distro idles around 0% CPU and less the 1gb memory without doing almost any tweaking but Win10/11 constantly sends calls home and idles on 4-6GB of rams. Other thing is how lightning fast linux can be.

    mellejwz,

    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.

    spader312,

    I believe Mac does this as well. If you have a lot of ram the os will use more ram as cache cause unused ram is wasted ram

    mellejwz,

    Exactly, most, if not all, os’s do this.

    Sentau,

    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.

    Tattorack,
    @Tattorack@lemmy.world avatar

    This was already proven at the height of Netflix, before streaming service hell.

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