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.
Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn’t use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don’t have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.
Valve is not publicly owned, I don’t think you can equate commerce to Capitalism.
Commerce conducted in a capitalist economy is inherently capitalist. Being publicly traded is not strictly required, though it might be the most common form of corporate structure under capitalism. Individuals, partnerships, privately-held and publicly-traded companies can all own capital. Valve’s assets are not owned by a government, its business decisions are made privately and it operates in a free market. Those three factors are pretty much the definition of capitalism.
Valve argued in court that you do not own any title in your library and that they are a subscription based service. That’s not very ethical.
You never owned any software, even before valve. All you ever purchased was a license key that could be revoked at any time.
That isn’t a problem made by valve, it existed far before the whole company was even founded. The underlying issue is the way digital mediums are licensed and the corresponding copyright laws.
Is that not true though? As much as we hate it, until you get given some transferrable proof of ownership of the game (like an NFT) and ability to play without being tied to one service, it’s the unfortunate reality of online game services.
It’s easy to go buy a physical game but when it’s online, you don’t own anything - yet
It’s true. Pragmatically speaking if you don’t have access to the server software you can’t play it if the servers go down, and besides reverse engineering or the goodwill of the developers I’m not aware of any games with online components that continue to be playable after their servers are taken down.
Well then allow me to name a few:
Battlefront 2 (the original), still active when the servers have been down for years
Titanfall 2. Official servers aren’t technically down, but pretty much unusable and NorthStar is the alternative
Counter strike 1.6 is pretty much just community-run servers, same with day of defeat: source. I don’t know if they are tied with valve that if valve shut them down, they wouldn’t be searchable.
Supreme commander: Forged Alliance
Hell, Battle for Middle Earth II still has a small community
Valheim has never had official servers. I run my own via docker on debian
Unreal Tournament 1999
Minecraft (official servers aren’t down, but if they shutdown there would still be 2000 servers)
Back in 2000-2012, a good lot of mainly singleplayer games had optional multiplayer modes. Think Halo, Starcraft, TRON, Titanfall, etc. Even DOOM 2016 had it. These games function with the servers down.
Something I haven’t thought about in a while: In the early 2000s games where you made a direct connection to the other player without an intervening, third-party server were still a thing. You still see it in things like netplay functionality in emulators.
Is this still a thing at all in 2023? Imagine it would be very niche, but this comment made me curious.
It’s still in Team Fortress 2 and Factorio
Fundamentally I don’t really know how it’d be viable to truly “own” a specific copy of something, when it’s always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such “ownership” is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.
So instead my personal take is that I’d rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don’t necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.
NFTs cannot have copies made (apart from by the publisher) and are ideally suited to this problem
But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.
The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be “official” instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies…but that’s using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from “lol copyright”, legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.
You’re talking about media linked to by existing NFTs. You can’t copy an NFT and use it, you don’t have the cryptographic keys to mint more. There is a finite number.
And what exactly is that NFT, as distinct from the media it’s linked to, useful for? Aside from simply saying that it is unique and one can have ownership of it.
Cryptographic licence verification so you can play the game, say for example to use online services. Allows you to trade that licence to other people directly, no third party involvement to facilitate the trade. The game would pick it up and work. Anyone could download the game files but they only work if you own the game either by buying off someone directly or an official publisher
Its really just because Gabe is the dude.
It would devolve of he died.
I’m not convinced that Valve will go down the tubes when Gabe shuffles off this moral coil (praise gaben may he live a thousand years). It would require a strong company culture that believes as he does that piracy is a service issue and is thus willing to adhere to his vision in his absence, but that can happen in a privately held company if there’s a strong succession plan in place.
Now, if Gabe dies and Valve goes public, then it’s pretty much over. Platform monetization, proft-taking and short-term thinking would enshittify Steam in short order.
More like socialism. Valve is privately owmed company that is run like half-company half-coop.
This.
Their strength comes from having zero management and all projects are born and lead by the devs themselves. As close to communism as you could get in a capitalistic world. It does come with some problems but they’re totally manageable - like having a strictly homogeneous workforce (which, one could argue, isn’t a bad thing)