I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my personal life, I run Linux on all my devices and I would never invest in non-opensource technology for my career. (Work forces me to run macOS, but that's another story).
For years now, I happily and only buy games on Steam, even if I have the choice between Steam and NoDRM. Simply because Steam just works(TM) and is convenient. (Of course one never buys games on steam with a forced additional starter from Ubisoft etc.).
Steam is really great from a technically POV, from a giving back to the community point and from a customer friendliness point (never had a problem with a return).
I even bought a SteamDeck although I am no big fan of handhelds, and for what it is, it is great.
I'll happily waste more money on my Steam backlog of shame. ;-)
I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would've paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.
The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.
I wouldn't necessarily say the best proof (that's probably things like Spotify and Google Music, services which effectively killed any and all MP3 sharing).
But yeah, the Steam Deck is an awesome platform. It's great to be able to carry games with you that you normally wouldn't be able to play portable. It's also an awesomely capable device for playing ROMS though, if you do decide to sail some seas :D
Not to say that Steam doesn't have some tremendous issues on this front (it does), but I truly wish more companies understood this. If you let me play / listen / watch your thing on whatever device I choose, for a reasonable one-time price, in perpetuity, I will pay that price.
Ten bucks for a Witcher season? Sure. A fiver for the latest season of Glup Shitto's Starred War Adventure? Yeah, I'm in. I'm not gonna pay $180 a year to five different companies each to watch six or seven new maybe great but probably mid TV shows.
Same goes for games. I'm not paying $80 plus a $40 battle pass every year to play Call of Duty 2: 3: War Crimes Boogaloo, Part 5. I'm just gonna steal your shit. I will not feel bad about it in the slightest.
Interesting take, for sure. I agree to some point. I also think Gabe just knows the audience, and he knows how much people would have rebelled against the very idea of this device if it came from Steam (not Valve), and excluded users. This would have been a completely failed product had the initial reviews been something like "Just a Switch knockoff".
Instead, this has garnered Steam as a platform with an entire group of adoring fans, some of whom used to be critics. I guarantee they added a ton of business to Steam as a platform just because a lot of users would buy, say, GTA5 on Steam again during a sale for $9 versus jumping through the tiny hoops to make a bootleg copy run.
They did a fantastic job in parallelism getting Proton to an easy to use product (for free, mind you), and reinventing the portable PC game. Many may not know that was an entire segment of handheld PC devices on the market for years before Deck hit, and Steam's team hit all the right spots to completely blow them away, and not only make them irrelevant, but also lure in new adoptees to Steam as a platform. Brilliant execution and moves.
Games are one of the very few things that I always pay for. Steam is mostly responsible for that. Also, music. But nowadays I do store some of my own music because I can have lossless that way.
It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Switch - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be.
I wish it was that easy! So far, the only way I know of is a hardmod, which already DQs for any remotely sensible form of DIY, and means a very real possibility of turning the Switch into a fancy paperweight.
At the end it's all about convenience and how much you need to tinker with something, because your free time also matters and if the effort to pirate something is higher than the price of that something then you are more likely to choose convenience. Same with Netflix.
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.
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.)
A lot of this is just easier to do from legit steam setup, not impossible. I don't usually pirate games (I want to support devs making things playable on Linux when I buy from Steam or making DRM-free stuff when I buy from Gog). But I do have a lot of stuff that I run outside of steam in plain old wine without proton or wine-wrapper tools like lutris. I haven't come across many games that I have on Gog that you can't run in wine itself but I will agree that it is sometimes a lot more work. I'm also on a desktop PC using Linux, so not completely the same as a steam deck but runtime-wise it should be pretty darn close.
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.
I love my Steam Deck. The fact that Valve made it so easy to upgrade, mod, repair, and running a full Linux distro so I can install anything on it is just awesome.
I've convinced 2 friends so far to buy one, so Valve is getting hella value from me on that front lol.
It's so nice that it just works with any controllers, any hardware, can be fully customized internally and externally.
I use it to watch TV and movies, stream my Jellyfin music, couch co-op, play my emulated GBA games, play FOSS games like Battle for Wesnoth and Super Tux Kart, and of course a bunch of my Steam games.
I don’t even own a steamdeck yet but most of my actual purchases are from Steam in preparation for the next big revision. Buy Steam cheap from keyshops, pirate GOG for backup.
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.
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.
Your argument that the Steam deck is emblematic of Gabe's statement of piracy being a service issue, is somehow reinforced by telling us all of the artificial hoops you have to jump through to pirate on the Steam Deck? That's just DRM with extra steps.
No they couldn't, it's fucking Linux. They'd have to tie the controller drivers hostage to "lock it down", and at that point they'd hit so many hiccups with legitimate users.
Like they'd have to pull so many things from Linux (in particular Proton) to "DRM-ify" the steamdeck.
And as I think someone else just posted, some of the stuff they'd need to lock-down aren't even things Valve has control over. Like I said Proton but Valve doesn't own proton.
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.
Well that’s completely untrue, the operating system is not open source, steamOS should be open source and Valve refuses to do it.
Your opinion on gaming is irrelevant because Proton is another software and Valve employees don’t contribute to the code, GitHub records show zero activity from them. Some games don’t even work.
Steam Deck/ Valve don’t support piracy, the User Agreement you signed up to obtain Steam Deck says by default it doesn’t support piracy.
They didn’t make games easier to buy. You still need the Client, you still need to sign up, you can’t sue Valve, you will get banned if the key is illegal and obtaining games that’s not American or Europe is super hard.
Valve just selling a junk machine with their brand. Nothing special about it.