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 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.
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.
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.