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.
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.
I only run legit games on my handheld Linux computer. You’re right, a user like me could most certainly install games some other way but there’s no point putting in all this effort since I can just joink it from my years old steam account and be very happy in the process.
Yeah, precisely because piracy is a service issue, Turkey and Argentina are going to turn to piracy again, after Valve fucked them over.
That, and the inflation making most of us broke-ass.
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.
Doing the absolute bare minimum to not be consumer hostile does not warrant praise. Just because Nintendo or Apple are worse doesn’t mean Valve is heroic for not doing things they really shouldn’t have the right to do anyway.
It’s built on Linux. Specifically Arch Linux. So no, there’s nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy. Not even if they wanted to.
Sure there is, they could have not built it on Arch Linux
It’s built on Linux.
So what? Orbis (the PlayStation OS) is built on FreeBSD, but there’s still anti piracy on the PS5.
So no, there’s nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy.
They could have:
- locked the machine to SteamOS only
- allowed only the Steam UI
- encrypted the SSD using a TPM chip to prevent messing with the OS.
- disallow applications that expose the underlying UI
- have an Apple esque signing policy when it comes to system binaries
- not allow custom shortcuts.
- much more
Believe me, if they wanted to try, they could have.
actually making linux usable with the deck controls was probably more work than locking the users out of the desktop mode even
You got me there. Doing stuff like that on other platforms like the Switch totally prevented piracy, so I suppose it’s a good thing they didn’t do it on a system that thousands of devs know down to the kernel without having to reverse engineer.
Nintendo is incompetent.
PS5 and Xbox both control what runs on their systems perfectly fine.
Nintendo was super competent with the Switch, their kernel is actually ridiculously secure. I’m pretty sure if Nvidia hadn’t messed up, we would still be scratching our heads with the Switch.
If you think that the goal of anti piracy measures is to be an impenetrable barrier, you’ve completely misunderstood the assignment.
The idea isn’t to be literally impossible, but to be so hard to do that even the moderate tech heads won’t bother.
The likes of Nintendo don’t care if 12 people are pirating their games, what they want to prevent is situations line the PlayStation Portable, where almost everyone was cracking that fucker wide open and there was a shit ton of piracy.
You said prevent, not eliminate. There’s tens of thousands of ways to prevent piracy. They are not infallible, but they are preventatives.
There is nothing on this earth that will eliminate piracy.
Where would you like to move the goalposts now?
That’s not moving goalposts, you’re just arguing semantics. People generally think of eliminate when they say prevent in this kind of conversation…
If anything if they went “prevention” and not “eliminate” like in your sense…it would be even dumber because it would just make the steamdeck a more restrictive x86-processor computer compared to the systems people were already comparing it to up until it’s release
Imagine how it would’ve gone down if people were saying “Of course you can do that, it’s a PC” if people responded with “Yeah, except it’s 10x harder to do things you could normally do on PC”. They wanted it to be close to how a PC is, it was part of the advertising campaign.
Anytime you’re reduced to arguing semantics, it’s not even an argument worth engaging in. So I’m not going to bother responding further to you.
And instead of doubling-down in denial, they embraced the openness.
They could have not given you root access and forced you to install your own OS for it to manage things that aren’t on Steam. They could have locked the bootloader and refused to install anything they didn’t sign.
Neither would violate the license provided they made the source available.
Tell me you don’t know how to administer Linux without telling me you don’t know how to administer Linux.
I don’t administer Linux, I use Linux. Unless you’re conflating being an end user with being an administrator, in which case I would say that’s a rather pretentious way to put it. Nobody walks around saying they administer Windows because they have a laptop. It sounds stupid.
The point is just using it gives you no experience to talk about how easy it is to lock down an OS, administering one does. EatYouWell is absolutely right in calling out that you don’t administer linux, as you say yourself: you don’t, you use it. And that difference shows in the falsehood of your comment: it is possible to lock down Linux to levels like a PS5 and anyone administering Linux would know that from their knowledge of the underlying components.
Right, so you don’t know what you’re talking about and shouldn’t speak authoritatively on the subject.
I drive a car every day, but that doesn’t mean I can speak authoritatively on how its transmission works.
But, I am a senior SecOps engineer (like a systems engineer but also a cyber security expert) working mostly with Linux, and I can authoritatively say that you’re mistaken about Valve’s ability to block piracy in Linux.
They could have not built it on arch linux. They made decisions that were pro-consumer and thus they did not need to make decisions that were anti piracy
Android is built on linux yet it is increasingly locked down and many phones are extremely difficult to get root access on.
So Valve could have followed the phone ecosystem path and pushed as much of the feature set as proprietary code as possible (binary blob drivers, proton proprietary instead of bsd), replaced pacman with a valve controlled package manager & repos, setup selinux to give users no power to do anything and made the deck only able to secure boot steamOS signed by Valve. Technical users may be able to jail break such a device but the majority would not be inclined to.
Valve’s wisdom here is in realizing that the majority are going to buy their games anyway but if you don’t lock the device down then most of the technical users will also buy most of their games whereas if you have to go out of your way to jail break a device to install something fun then that device basically becomes a piracy only device from that point on.
There’s a lot they could have done, locking down Linux isn’t that hard. Just look at Chrome OS, it’s based on Gentoo, yet it’s locked down completely. All they had.to do is lock the BIOS, enable secure boot and disable root access, and then it’s pretty much a locked system.
I disagree. You don’t seem to understand piracy at all.
If you’re going to pirate games, you’ll find a way. I have spent hours sometimes figuring out how to do so, and it’s almost part of the fun.
The only reason I’d look at buying a Steam deck in future is to play pirated games. If I absolutely love a game and developer then sure, I’d buy it if I have the cash but otherwise you may as well pirate it.
The only reason I don’t pirate games IS because of locked down hardware like Playstation Etc. Otherwise, I have pretty much never bought a game on PC.
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.
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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
For any game with online components, the “ideal” way to combat piracy or cheating is with leaving as much stuff on the server side as possible, not unlike an MMO. Anything left to client side validation will be hacked.
Zachtronics games are single-player puzzle games with online scoreboards (a killer feature tbh). They validate your scores by uploading your solution to the server and running it.
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Encrypt your logs: exactly what you feared, and someone can just disable the encryption call or edit the key in memory too. Lots of ways to attack it.
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If they change the key in memory, then it doesn’t matter that you have the other side of the prior asymmetric key.
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- 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
They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.
I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it’s still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam’s servers for cloud saves.
(The fact that it’s hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I’ve absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)
Well if someone is out there doing it for free, isn’t it silly that some are demanding money and doing all kinds of extra work to lock things down?
You don’t gotta pay me to dance, but I put on a better show than any trained ballerina.
that’s why i use spotify, almost all songs i want, great UI, the discovery algorithm is rad, and sharing a playlist for the communal work speaker is easy.
Steam dick
What a useful comment
Steam dick
Huh?
Steam dick
Say no more fam
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
How is your comment at all relevant to the idea of Apple benefiting from piracy?
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.
So apple does something crappy… And you’re upset with the people that enjoy their services?
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.
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.
I’m excitedly waiting for my OLED to arrive
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From context I get the impression that was a mistake and OP wrote Switch when they meant Deck. The rest of the paragraph seems to have pretty deck specific information.
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