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 can’t even remember the last time I pirated a game. Probably over a decade?
I might have to pirate a game from the Wii U though they they won’t remake for the switch:(
I do. 2008, Sims 2. I owned a legit copy, but the DRM was too much of a hassle, plus I didn’t want my kids to scratch the discs. So I pirated a playable, child-proof version.
The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection Supremacy
I heard people pirating old Wii games so that they can be emulated. Also, games with way too many DLCs like Sims.
I don’t remember Nintendo ever remaking a Wii U game for switch, and even if they port one over, the experience is only marginally better than it used to be
? Most switch launch games were direct Wii u ports with minimal changes
Zelda, captain toad, donkey Kong, Mario kart, new super Mario bros Wii u, Bayonetta, and so on
Basically if a Wii u game sold more than a threshold, they ported it to the switch if it didn’t need a rewrite or rethink
Well yeah, that’s what I just said?
Ya, this game in question wasn’t a port.
They said something about how it was written couldn’t be ported over and they’d essentially need to redo the whole game so it’ll never be brought over.
XenobladeX?
Correct