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.
The steam deck is how you prevent piracy. If you look at the huge influx of streaming services, you’ll see an example of how you encourage piracy. I recently dropped three of my services in favor of one pirate site that has almost everything. They even offer a subscription tier and I’ve considered it. I’m willing to pay for good content. What I’m not willing to do is pay dozens of middlemen across multiple companies to rip off the people who actually make my favorite shows and then memory hole the shows a few months after they premiere.
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.
I very rarely backup game saves but only the thought of being locked to a console puts me off. I can’t possibly invest 100+ hours in a Pokemon game and lose everything of the battery dies, screen breaks, console is forgotten on a bus or stolen, and so on.
Switch save files can be saved in the cloud, but the game devs have to enable it. You can also save them to an SD card.
Saved in the cloud if youre a NSO subscriber* Aint paying for the sub? Tough luck kid.
Ah, I didn’t research that far into it, so good point. Although I can see the reasoning behind it from a business standpoint.
Except for Pokémon games which are saved directly to the internal storage and unable to be moved unless you have the original save device (and it’s working) as well as the new device and transfer the save manually.
Splatoon is the same. Saves are locked to the system, even with NSO.
Animal crossing was the same until people raised hell about it.
My point was that it’s on the devs, not Nintendo. The functionality exists, devs just need to implement it.
The same was true for Steam as well, once upon a time.
the comment you replied to:
I can’t possibly invest 100+ hours in a Pokemon game and lose everything of the battery dies, screen breaks, console is forgotten on a bus or stolen, and so on.
it is nintendo’s choice disable cloud saves on pokémon. splatoon and animal crossing are both made by studios under nintendo’s umbrella, and nintendo already showed they can exert that pressure if they need to with animal crossing.
saying “it’s up to the devs, not nintendo” neither answers the complaint you replied to nor has any semantic relevance to the titles above. moreover, SD cards cannot be used for these titles.
No, it’s not Nintendo’s choice. That’s like saying it’s Nvidia’s choice when a game doesn’t implement hardware accelerated ray tracing.
You’re just describing pc gaming though, not specifically steam deck gaming.
memory hole
sick turn of phrase, i’m stealing that
Please read 1984. That’s where this term comes from. You’re living through a combination of it and Brave New World.
But in this universe, people willingly pay money for Big Brother to watch them.
No, they pay money for Younger Brother, the capitalist version of Big Brother to watch them. Big Bro is always watching regardless.
I think it’s more like Big Cousin instead of little brother, since the corpos run things.
Amazon TVs seem like they used 1984 as a reference.
But yeah somewhere between 1984 and BNW sounds right. The government and the megacorporations are not opposed but in fact the very same party. Instead of mood-numbing or happy drugs, it’s sugar and antidepressants. Instead of government watching you it’s corporations selling every part of your identity down to your menstruation cycle. You are kept in line with debt rather than force, which is honestly worse because you put the shackles on yourself, and you do it because the alternative is worse.
Your own special hell.
at least we get bumblepuppies and soma (tiktok and marijuana)
With respect to social media, I think Fahrenheit 451 might have nailed that best. Everyone involved in a neverending orgy of ego and drama over dumb shit, most of which isn’t real anyway.
Did anyone predict the agrostophobia?
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.
I think steam in general is a proof that its a service issue
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.
Valve is not publicly owned, I don’t think you can equate commerce to Capitalism.
Commerce conducted in a capitalist economy is inherently capitalist. Being publicly traded is not strictly required, though it might be the most common form of corporate structure under capitalism. Individuals, partnerships, privately-held and publicly-traded companies can all own capital. Valve’s assets are not owned by a government, its business decisions are made privately and it operates in a free market. Those three factors are pretty much the definition of capitalism.
Exactly. Free Market ≠ Capitalism
https://doctorow.medium.com/capitalists-hate-capitalism-6406089e2118
Valve argued in court that you do not own any title in your library and that they are a subscription based service. That’s not very ethical.
Is that not true though? As much as we hate it, until you get given some transferrable proof of ownership of the game (like an NFT) and ability to play without being tied to one service, it’s the unfortunate reality of online game services.
It’s easy to go buy a physical game but when it’s online, you don’t own anything - yet
It’s true. Pragmatically speaking if you don’t have access to the server software you can’t play it if the servers go down, and besides reverse engineering or the goodwill of the developers I’m not aware of any games with online components that continue to be playable after their servers are taken down.
Back in 2000-2012, a good lot of mainly singleplayer games had optional multiplayer modes. Think Halo, Starcraft, TRON, Titanfall, etc. Even DOOM 2016 had it. These games function with the servers down.
Something I haven’t thought about in a while: In the early 2000s games where you made a direct connection to the other player without an intervening, third-party server were still a thing. You still see it in things like netplay functionality in emulators.
Is this still a thing at all in 2023? Imagine it would be very niche, but this comment made me curious.
It’s still in Team Fortress 2 and Factorio
Well then allow me to name a few:
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Battlefront 2 (the original), still active when the servers have been down for years
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Titanfall 2. Official servers aren’t technically down, but pretty much unusable and NorthStar is the alternative
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Counter strike 1.6 is pretty much just community-run servers, same with day of defeat: source. I don’t know if they are tied with valve that if valve shut them down, they wouldn’t be searchable.
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Supreme commander: Forged Alliance
Hell, Battle for Middle Earth II still has a small community
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Valheim has never had official servers. I run my own via docker on debian
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Unreal Tournament 1999
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Minecraft (official servers aren’t down, but if they shutdown there would still be 2000 servers)
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Fundamentally I don’t really know how it’d be viable to truly “own” a specific copy of something, when it’s always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such “ownership” is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.
So instead my personal take is that I’d rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don’t necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.
NFTs cannot have copies made (apart from by the publisher) and are ideally suited to this problem
But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.
The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be “official” instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies…but that’s using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from “lol copyright”, legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.
You’re talking about media linked to by existing NFTs. You can’t copy an NFT and use it, you don’t have the cryptographic keys to mint more. There is a finite number.
sure they have done some shitty things
Here’s to throwing the baby out with the bathwater I guess
I can agree that Valve has done some good things, such as making digital distribution go big, making indie games viable, and doing a lot to advance gaming on Linux.
But I’d also argue that that doesn’t obligate me to spend money to patronize them, particularly when I can get a better (by virtue of being DRM-free) product elsewhere.
You never owned any software, even before valve. All you ever purchased was a license key that could be revoked at any time.
That isn’t a problem made by valve, it existed far before the whole company was even founded. The underlying issue is the way digital mediums are licensed and the corresponding copyright laws.
That’s not really true. I still have physical media that I’ve purchased as a teenager. That’s not a license key that I own that’s physical media. It was independent of any licensing servers or anything like that. Digital media licensing didn’t really start taking effect until about 2010ish en masse. Prior to that most streaming services like Netflix weren’t really streaming services as internet infrastructure didn’t quite exist to that degree yet.
They also forced developers to never price lower on any other platform than steam as a condition fire selling on steam. Which is not only unethical, it’s illegal. Also the secret hardware changes to steam deck which people usually try to justify, but was shady no matter what.
That’s not entirely true. Valve forces devs to not sell Steam keys lower on other sites without also going on sale on Steam in a reasonable close amount of time.
I know it sounds the same at first, but it’s a drastic difference. You can generate as many Steam keys as you like and sell then on other sites, Valve won’t see a single cent from these sales. They however still provide their online services and servers for free for all those keys sold on other sites. It is quite reasonable that they force you to match prices since they literally are losing money (albeit not much) if you sell on other platforms. And I don’t mean lost sales, but infrastructure cost.
And additionally is this rule pretty much never enforced. AAA studios have special deals and indi devs aren’t worth the hassle.
I can’t speak to whether or not that is true, because it’s not necessarily exclusive. Both can be correct. It’s not what’s in the antitrust lawsuit. it’s not what I’m talking about either. The issue outlined in the antitrust suit is: *“Valve has for years maintained its dominance and thwarted effective competition by engaging in various anticompetitive acts. For example, Valve forces game publishers to agree to a Platform Most-Favored-Nations Clause (the “Valve PMFN”) as a requirement to access Steam. Valve explicitly requires that publishers agree that games sold elsewhere must be sold “in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam” and publishers cannot “give Steam customers a worse deal” for games sold elsewhere,2 i.e., Valve prohibits publishers from giving consumers a better deal on other stores that compete with Steam. Valve interprets and enforces this language to encompass price parity, forcing game publishers to charge the inflated Steam Store price across the marketplace, on all game sales, even sales of games that are not enabled for Steam. Valve thus uses its PMFN to control the prices of games sold in the Steam Store and in other stores. Rather than lowering prices to Steam customers, Valve’s PMFN has the effect of reducing price competition and raising game prices.” That’s one of several complaints against Valve." * I’m really surprised so many people here of all places believe any corporation gives a shit about anything but their money. Corporations are never your friend. If they helped make piracy necessary it wasn’t done for our benefit, it was done because it is profitable for them. Here’s the complaint in case No. 2:21-cv-00563-JCC in it’s entirety: https://www.steamclaims.com/_files/ugd/5210fb_80b19705e27549158fea02a16055b0e4.pdf
I’m really surprised so many people here of all places believe any corporation gives a shit about anything but their money. Corporations are never your friend.
I never said valve is a friend, they simply are the more trustworthy party in this lawsuit. Two things about this:
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I’ve never seen any proof of this MFN clause. I’ve read the Steamworks distribution agreement (which is hidden behind an NDA), I’ve read the steam TOS, I’ve looked through the steamworks documentation that is declared as legally binding in the contract, I’ve looked for screenshots or citations. There is nothing that would even suggest they are interfering with non-steamkey prices apart from what Wolfire games tells the court. (Who are, of course, coincidentally using the same Lawfirm as epic does, which makes this whole thing even more suspicious.)
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This is the second time this lawsuit is brought up and there are pretty much no complaints from other devs, not even anonymous. Usually when lawsuits like this happen a bandwagon full of people come out to complain, twitter descends into a shitstorm and reddit digs out their aluminium foil hats. But there is absolutely nothing at the moment.
You are free to post any links with proof you have. Maybe the lawsuit will dig up something in Valve’s basement. But as of now, everything we’ve seen is just one big accusation from Wolfire games.
You did not that’s correct, that was meant more towards all of the people in the thread in general worshiping steam as a corporate savior. That was poor writing on my part. The things you mentioned are almost word for word the conjecture you find on Reddit and has not proof itself. I would love to see a copy of the MFN myself. Valve definitely admits they ask developers to offer similar prices according to their responses to other users, but won’t deny it or produce a copy themselves of any MFN. All I’m saying is they’re in a well deserved anti-trust suit that covers several topics beyond the MFN as detailed in the links I did provide. Their motions to dismissed have been slapped down because the judges feels there’s enough evidence to proceed on at least some of the claims. I guess we’ll see whether the case can prove itself or not and neither of us will really know until all of the evidence is presented. I’m not blindly believing they must be guilty, but it’s hard to say Steam isn’t a monopoly. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Steam, but arguing that with the other people here is a bit like arguing with gun owners. People are willing to dismiss their principles about things that affect the macrocosm quickly when it could deprive them of something they personally enjoy.
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They would probably have issues with publishers if you actually owned the titles.
It’d probably make them very heavily liable if for some reason Steam shut down, they had to make something unavailable for some reason, whatever.
This is exactly what happened actually in one of Valve’s court cases. It wasn’t that Steam went down, but rather the user was permabanned. When that ban happened he lost access to his game library. However, he had purchased those games so he argued successfully that he had a right to download what he purchased. Valve attempted to argue that they were a subscription service so that they would not have to provide anything to him. In the end since he won the case, he was allowed to download what he purchased. I’m sure that created a weird situation for those publishers and I’m not sure whether or not Steam had to remove the Steam DRM prior to allowing him to download.
Its really just because Gabe is the dude.
It would devolve of he died.
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.
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?
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.
trust me, the people who work at valve right now know better than to make those stupid ass decisions
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!
since the alternative is being kicked out at 18 without anywhere to go or money.
More like socialism. Valve is privately owmed company that is run like half-company half-coop.
This.
Their strength comes from having zero management and all projects are born and lead by the devs themselves. As close to communism as you could get in a capitalistic world. It does come with some problems but they’re totally manageable - like having a strictly homogeneous workforce (which, one could argue, isn’t a bad thing)
Costco has seemingly done it as well.
At the very least they are night and day compared to the vast majority of scummy employers out there.
I always find it fascinating that almost all their profit is simply membership fees.
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.
dude just pirate the game and pay when it is on sale. gabe will aprove because he hasn’t fixed the “i have no money” issue.
have no money" issue.
Whos working in that by the way?
It’s not immoral to prioritize feeding and clothing yourself, send it.
Don’t even need Steam deck. The Steam store has put an end to my pirate life over a decade ago.
On multiple occasions, I have found myself rather wait for sale and bought a game on Steam, than receive it for free on Epic store.
I put every single games that I have ever pirated in Steam’s wishlist (if it’s available). Then slowly buying them one by one when they goes on sale. I’m not rich by any means and it’s the least I can do.
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.
Can you play “Windows only” Steam games on Linux?
Probably a stupid question, sorry.
Super broad generalization, yes.
That’s one of the biggest things valve has contributed to for the Linux community, unshitifying gaming on Linux. Proton does an amazingly good job at working on most games. And steam does a great job of making it easier to use proton.
Now there are always a few problem games, mainly ones that use some crazy kernel level anti-cheat (that doesn’t work anyways). But if you’re curious look at https://www.protondb.com/
Not a dumb question if you haven’t been keeping up.
The Steam Deck runs Linux and not Windows by default. (It can be loaded by the user if desired.)
Given their desire for a nearly-console-like experience, they put in a bunch of effort into the Proton compatibility layer to get Windows games to work here. It’s not perfect, but it really is a very good experience at this point.
I personally do have a fairly powerful Windows desktop, but the vast majority of my gaming is on Linux on my Steam Deck now.
Yeah, so like everyone else has said, generally yes. There are occasionally issues, but the only issues I’ve had so far (that see actually issues with the game running and not anti-cheat that just blocks Linux) have been solved by fixes I found on ProtonDB.
Apparently, on average, games actually run even better on Linux. This is due to the combination of a less bloated OS, but also because proton is translating DirectX into Vulkan, and doing it a smart way such that it’s actually more efficient usually. So far, it’s only GamePass and those few multiplayer games that have fallen short.
Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We’re talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.
I tried Commandos (released in 1998) the other day. It worked nearly flawlessly. I still needed to set my bottle (application for running wine/proton with presets) to run in an older version of Windows compatibility mode I think, but you need to do that in Windows probably too.
(You do need a fan patch to make it run at modern resolutions, but that’s not required, and it’s needed for windows too.)
Hmm, seems like this is really might be getting to a point where non-viable instances are the exception rather than the rule. At least, I hope that’s the case these days.
I’m too busy to switch to Linux at the moment but if I have to it’s definitely an option I’m making back-burner plans for.
I did the same thing as you until a few months ago. I had used Linux many years ago, but never fully switched, so I wasn’t too worried. Windows has been frustrating me for years now, and one day the search bar showed back up even though I’ve told it many times to not have it. At that point I decided I was done using an operating system that didn’t listen to me and I switched over. It’s been an amazing experience. There’s only one game that hasn’t worked for me so far. I don’t remember the name, but it was a beta for a BR style game, and it was only because the anti-cheat hadn’t been updated to accept Linux, not because it didn’t run.
Yes, because of Proton, which is a version of Wine optimized for Steam games. Some games have official compatibility. For the rest, you have to tick a box saying to use Proton even if it hasn’t been tested, and 90% of them just work.
You can play most of them with proton, but some multiplayer games are impossible because anti cheats not supporting linux.
You can check your games at protondb if they run well, or have instructions how to run them.
Thanks, this is exactly what I need.
edit: aww, my favorite racing game Dirt Rally 2.0 is not supported, windows only. But Dirt Rally (1) is supported by all 3 OS: windows, mac, and linux, plus support for VR. So somehow the sequel is worse. Is it just a case of lazy devs?
The average playerbase of linux is still under like 2% so its understandable if they stop supporting it.
Also checked on protondb, and looks like runs great if you enable proton-ge, so you might still want to give it a chance
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.
The moral of piracy is hard to define imo. And there’s definitely no hard right or wrong.
In my case, in the past I pirate because I live in a 3rd world country and $60 is entire month’s salary.
Nowadays, some time games doesn’t offer demo or trial, and I can’t afford to buy something I wouldn’t enjoy after 30 minutes playthrough.
Some people say they pirate because fuck the devs or publishers. But then you But for me, if some devs or publishers are considered bad and not worth supporting in my eyes, I just doesn’t give a shit about anything they put out. It’s that simple, don’t look it up, don’t talk about it, don’t engage in its discussion online, fuck’em. Nintendo is one of those in my eyes because of their constant anti-consumer behavior.
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:(
I can’t even remember the last time I pirated a game.
I do. 2008, Sims 2. I owned a legit copy, but the DRM was too much of a hassle, plus I didn’t want my kids to scratch the discs. So I pirated a playable, child-proof version.
The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection Supremacy
When its for a discontinued console, or games that have been scalped to nuts prices because the owners cba to preserve it, it can barely be considered piracy imo. Its not sane to buy a used console and games for it if it doesent get support or even have online capabilities anymore. Nintendos the worst for it lmao
I heard people pirating old Wii games so that they can be emulated. Also, games with way too many DLCs like Sims.
I might have to pirate a game from the Wii U though they they won’t remake for the switch:(
I don’t remember Nintendo ever remaking a Wii U game for switch, and even if they port one over, the experience is only marginally better than it used to be
? Most switch launch games were direct Wii u ports with minimal changes
Zelda, captain toad, donkey Kong, Mario kart, new super Mario bros Wii u, Bayonetta, and so on
Basically if a Wii u game sold more than a threshold, they ported it to the switch if it didn’t need a rewrite or rethink
Well yeah, that’s what I just said?
Ya, this game in question wasn’t a port.
They said something about how it was written couldn’t be ported over and they’d essentially need to redo the whole game so it’ll never be brought over.
XenobladeX?
Correct
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.
Actually, Steam Regional Pricing is the only way I can afford to buy games legitimately. I live in a 3rd world country, and we’re poor compared to the majority of the world. Thanks to regional pricing, a full price USD$60 game is now $15 in my country. Believe it or not but minimum wage here is <$1/hour.
I have to admit that I’ve never bought a game “full price” of $15, not that I wanted to, just can’t afford it. I believe my most expensive game is ~$10.
unfortunately every time pricing isnt close or worse than USD it gets abused by steam gift resellers which is why they have to crack down :( lots of people were abusing it - i know people who would set their country to countries with favorable steam conversion rates for cheaper games
Fuck those abusers. They’re the reason why Steam adjusted the regional pricing in my country to +50% (some games +100%). Before, $60 games in western countries are translated to $10 in my country, now they’re $15 - $20. And our minimum wage is <$1/hour.
agreed - they really ruin it for everyone
Hey guys, we’ve sold 4 million copies of our game in this country I’d never heard of!!!
Goes to wiki for country
Population: 1.2 million
Fuck.
deleted by creator
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.
The deck has made me more likely to buy a game on steam because of how easy it is.
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.
For non steam games I use syncthing but that always requires just a little bit of work.
Can you use this feature with games added as a shortcut (bought from other means).
I’m guessing the answer is no?
A non-steam game can be launched through Steam on either device, but Steam doesn’t sync game saves for non-Steam games, hence Toribor’s use of syncthing. Once a sync job is set up for each game’s save folder, it’ll keep them synced about as well as Steam does for native games.
Pretty neat workaround!
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.
Same. I play the same 5 games throughout the year and rarely buy anything, but a few games I’d been looking at went on sale. I could’ve pirated them, but it was just so much easier to click buy on my Steam Deck and instantly download and play them. Not to mention cloud saves for free, remote play, and the ability to dock the thing to my 65" 4k TV.
Steam has robbed me of more money than any streaming service ever could, and I’m not even mad because they provide the best service I’ve ever received no matter how many or few games I buy. They recently identified one of the biggest reasons for refunds and piracy being people who want to validate games will run well on their system, especially on Steam Deck. As a result they’re working on a demo feature so you can test a game before buying it.
A demo feature would be absolutely amazing.
Yeah and once I got a steam deck I got back into PC gaming and built a rig spending even more money on steam games. It’s win, win for Gabe.
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.
I actually bought some games on Steam I already owned on other launchers because while I could set them up via Lutris or the like just hitting “Play” is so much easier it’s unreal. Valve is doing so much to make Linux game as comfortable as possible I don’t even remotely consider buying from anyone else because there it’s a pain in the ass just to get the game running once, never mind keeping it running through updates
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.
I use syncthing for my emulator savestates between retroarch on my deck and retroarch on my android tv(no steam client or steam cloud sync for android or android tv), no matter where i decide to play I always have my most recent save. It also has versioning so i can go back to older versions of saves. I use a virtual private server(or seedbox) running syncthing as the in-between cloud host.
I wrote up a guide on how to do it in the Steam Retroarch community guides. It shouldn’t be much different for PC game saves, just choosing a different folder, specifically the one with your chosen files.
This was already proven at the height of Netflix, before streaming service hell.
Speaking of services, I wonder how much piracy would go down if Netflix and Disney Plus and such would let you rent a film or episode at £0.50-£2 at a time for 24 hours, like how Google Play used to let you. That way if you don’t own one of the subscriptions, you can still watch by paying pocket change. Or watch unlimited by paying the monthly fee.
That’s why film piracy slowed for a while there - when people weren’t being gouged they were happy to pay what they felt was reasonable. But now that the gouging is back… yo ho ho.
It is as simple as providing a service that has all content I want to watch. Look at things like Spotify or Apple Music. They don’t have everything, but it’s enough and has effectively stopped my pirating music.
Same with Netflix. It stopped me pirating because of the convenience, but since everything got separated in its own service again, I started up my own plex server. I’m not jumping through a million hoops to watch a stupid show or film…
Vudu, Amazon, and iTunes have renting capabilities.
Isn’t it typically close to the same price as buying it?
Yes
It’s interesting you mention Apple because while I have every expectation that you’re correct at the moment, the iPod absolutely benefited from piracy. iTunes allowed you to add your own songs to your library to sync with the device, and iTunes could also be argued to have been on a similar model to Steam because you’d pay to ‘own’ the songs and there was no subscription giving you access to songs.
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?
I think they’re talking about the OG one not whatever they’re doing since then and they’re 100% correct. Every track on the Ipod nano I had was pirated. Idk what apple has done since then because that was the only apple device I ever used at all and I ended up replacing it with PSP but they did originally benefit from piracy because I wouldn’t have bought it if I wasn’t able to add my own music like that.
What? I’ve been using iPhones with pirated songs for 10+ years and never had this happen.
Genuinely curious, I know Apple does shit like that sometimes so I wouldn’t put it past them, but I’ve never seen happen or heard about this.
How is your comment at all relevant to the idea of Apple benefiting from piracy?
So apple does something crappy… And you’re upset with the people that enjoy their services?
Is that a rhetorical question? I’ve had a few Apple products mostly in the past or issued to me from when, but I prefer android even when it can be disappointing to me sometimes. Was launching into nandroid via Haret when Windows Mobile devices were a thing too. I don’t prefer Apple stuff but whether it be sincere or perhaps theatrics, it seems like you’ve got an unnecessary and over aggressive revulsion towards them.
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.
they did it without relying on DRM
Steam itself has some kind of DRM. You need to login to Steam to access the games you bought (sure there’s offline mode but then you can’t download your games, update or buy more, so it’s only temporary convenience). If Steam dies one day, so will your Steam games library.
However, the service is great, so it’s not annoying.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.
Yeah, I too can make wildly lofty promises that probably won’t need to ever be verified.
Valve is one of the few companies I would someone trust with this promise… So long as the current people in charge are still in charge.
Whoever takes over might have very different ideas.
This is exactly my issue with every single company. They start off great and then the original owner/CEO croaks and we get Mr/Mrs Chicago Business School asshole who swoops in For The Shareholders™ and burns all the goodwill to the ground in the name of Profits!™©®
That’s my problem with all of patent and copyright. The people who make something matter are not the money people who claimed it all.
Valve is currently a private company, which is likely why they’ve been able to avoid enshittification for so long. All we can do is hope that whoever eventually takes over when Gabe steps down also has his ideals at heart.
They won’t. It will go to the highest bidder. Every company does. Stop thinking your favourite one is a special exception. The problem is systemic.
Things can definitely change, but I’ve got half a dozen games that still run that you can’t get on steam anymore. You can also add games that steam doesn’t sell so I get the skepticism but so far they’ve been good
can’t get on steam anymore
Can’t buy or can’t install anymore? Because that’s a huge difference in my book.
You can reinstall any game you’ve purchased even after it’s no longer being sold.
That’s what I meant to imply.
They can revoke stuff from your library.
They just usually don’t have a reason to do so.
(Also, you might not be able to get older versions of the game anymore. Meaning that you may be stuck with unwanted content changes in some games.)
They can’t revoke anything if it’s not installed where they think it is.
You mean the last part is not correct. I did forget that I heard that point before. However, it is still a DRM and you are relying on a promise made by a for-profit company that it will be removed if necessary. I don’t think history showed this kind of trust is deserved. Steam is doing good right now and has a strong founder and leader. What happens when he’s gone in 20 years, and the company has financial troubles?
That’s a good policy. As long as the right people are still around to enforce it, it’s a little reassuring.
Yeah I mean that’s a fundamental problem.
We can a) trust people/companies as long as they don’t give us a reason to not trust them.
Or b) we can never trust anyone but then this discussion is pointless anyway.
If there was no DRM we wouldn’t need to trust anyone to undo it.
Or if that emergency release of the DRM was a contractual guarantee we had at point of purchase, we’d also need less trust.
Uh…ALL of them? I’m gonna need more storage.
Usefull idiot talk.
There’s literally no way they could do that without being sued into ashes.
Explain
They can do that for games using steam drm. Even for games using custom drm they can let it remain on your pc if you have already downloaded it, it’s not their duty to remove games from your pc even if devs pull games from steam. Whether custom drm games continue to work or not will depend on if they phone home are not.
Anyone can be sued obviously, but there will be no ashes, they aren’t random Joes to be afraid of legal trolls.
So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here’s the information someone else found when they looked into it.
https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)
In summary, this “policy” is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.
As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), there’s nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there’s nothing saying they can’t just update the SSA to remove such a term.
Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam’s size I’d say it’s less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can’t be held to this promise anyway.
So, while it’d definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.
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.
Even Steam themselves say it sucks for preventing piracy:
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
Plus, it’s optional for devs.
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.
Or maybe exclusively time to game as we live in our caves waiting for the fallout to settle. How many watts is a potato?
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
That’s an interesting point.
*only the games you didnt download
Obviously you would need to be in online mode to download something. That’s how the Internet works.
I just hope that steam stays good. it’s great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM
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.
Funny how we’ve just accepted that any publicly traded company has to become shit and take no action about it
For a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom to create value.
Shareholders are the real customers.
People who buy the products become a resource to extract value from.
It’s been like that since the Dutch East India company…
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.
And its our fault too. Its easy to see shareholders as rich fatcats telling the CEO to “Put MTX in it and make it slow and grindy!”, but if any of us have IRAs or retirement accounts, we are the shareholders too. We want the nest egg we set aside to grow, and that leads to the same problem.
That’s my point, we just accepted it as a society, no one goes around complaining about what’s literally ruining the world. We act like companies decide to be shit just because they’re evil but you don’t see people debating about how this system is unsustainable
deleted by creator
How was the hangover?
And do you care to elaborate on the Foundation writers and personal narratives?
Well, I stopped pirating games a long ago because of steam, because of how good it was/is as a service and low prices. I don’t think any game publisher should cry about steam prices, because when the AAA game is just released and for a full price, millions of FOMOs run to buy it. And I can wait and see if it’s worth it.
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.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.
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
Exactly, most, if not all, os’s do this.
Also they contribute loads to the Linux ecosystem so im happy to support them as I see it as a win/win . The sales are great too I spend like 50 ducats a year and get like 9 or 10 great games for that.
The sales are shit and have been for years.
The price of PC getting popular I guess.
Ever tried to buy a game on a console?
Yes, physical sales are miles better than digital. Even better if you shop used.
If you think Steam sales are still great, then you’re either young or have a crap memory. Used to be the case that 6-12 month old games went for 75% off and often more. The flash sales died and so did the bargains.
Now Steam is just ancient games at full price until the next sale so they can claim “60% off” again so it matches the price of a PS5 disc on Amazon or wherever.
I literally stopped playing my pirated copy of Spider-Man Remastered to play an official copy on the Steam Deck because it was on sale.
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.
