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.
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 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.
😈
Well they can revoke your ability to use the Steam client to install and access it.
But of course, fuck that. Steam doesn’t need to monitor what we do with our games 24/7.