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.
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™ 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. ;-)
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.
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.
I’m excitedly waiting for my OLED to arrive
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.
