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.
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.
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.
This sort of behavior (and other nastier things, such as introducing advertising for Microsoft services) is why I don’t trust Windows Updates and am increasingly distrustful of Windows being a satisfactory operating system.
Also I’d like it to be less bloated. Sure, fancy bells and whistles are nice to look at, but if I could make things look like Win98 again I totally would. I don’t actually need things like transparency or 3D rotation/resizing effects.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.