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.
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.
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.
There’s literally no way they could do that without being sued into ashes.
Explain
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:
Plus, it’s optional for devs.
It’s optional for devs so plenty of games don’t use it at all
That’s an interesting point.
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.)
*only the games you didnt download
Obviously you would need to be in online mode to download something. That’s how the Internet works.