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....
Not to defend the shitty companies out there, but in a sense they have no choice. Once you’re publicly traded shareholders expect infinite growth at ANY cost to the consumers or the employees of the company. Every single year they expect to see their return increase, even looking like a plateau for a short period is enough to make a huge chunk of the greedy bastards jump ship. IMO shareholders are the number one, most direct and largest cause of the enshitification of everything. Being publicly traded these days is a death sentence for a companies nature and good will.
I remember getting a PS3 just to avoid this back then (lemmy.zip)
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....