Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

I think steam in general is a proof that its a service issue

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.

The deck has made me more likely to buy a game on steam because of how easy it is.

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.

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.

they did it without relying on DRM

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.

I just hope that steam stays good. it's great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM

I was playing MegaMan Battle Neckwork and Tony Hawks pro Skater using emu deck for almost a year.

When both dropped on Steam I bought both. Unfortunately MegaMan Battle Network requires Internet to run so I reverted back to the emulators.

Tony Hawk is a wonderful port however.

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.

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 buy most of my games on steam simply because it makes running them on Linux so damn easy, and I remember the bad old days when it was hell!

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.

Steam dick

Here's my piracy shtick.

I beat half of Blasphemous on a pirated copy then I bought it, moved the save file and kept playing.

Criteria: I like the game. I'll probably play it again in ten years and I want to support the devs.

What would've happened if I never pirated it? I'd be saying the same thing about someone else's game.

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.