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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[–] filister@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

At the end it's all about convenience and how much you need to tinker with something, because your free time also matters and if the effort to pirate something is higher than the price of that something then you are more likely to choose convenience. Same with Netflix.

[–] BaardFigur@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Piracy solutions can be made good too, though.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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

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[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

That, and the inflation making most of us broke-ass.

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