Nintendo is incompetent.

PS5 and Xbox both control what runs on their systems perfectly fine.

If you think that the goal of anti piracy measures is to be an impenetrable barrier, you’ve completely misunderstood the assignment.

The idea isn’t to be literally impossible, but to be so hard to do that even the moderate tech heads won’t bother.

The likes of Nintendo don’t care if 12 people are pirating their games, what they want to prevent is situations line the PlayStation Portable, where almost everyone was cracking that fucker wide open and there was a shit ton of piracy.

You said prevent, not eliminate. There’s tens of thousands of ways to prevent piracy. They are not infallible, but they are preventatives.

There is nothing on this earth that will eliminate piracy.

Where would you like to move the goalposts now?

Switch save files can be saved in the cloud, but the game devs have to enable it. You can also save them to an SD card.

Amazon TVs seem like they used 1984 as a reference.

But yeah somewhere between 1984 and BNW sounds right. The government and the megacorporations are not opposed but in fact the very same party. Instead of mood-numbing or happy drugs, it’s sugar and antidepressants. Instead of government watching you it’s corporations selling every part of your identity down to your menstruation cycle. You are kept in line with debt rather than force, which is honestly worse because you put the shackles on yourself, and you do it because the alternative is worse.

Your own special hell.

Seeing and taking advantage of services and being happy with it when there is consistency is not brand loyalty. Honestly, always putting these messages behind coy insults just detracts from the actual important part of what you’re trying to say, which is to be wary of where you put your trust. That’s a very valid point of view. It’s true, I am probably trading off these services for the potential longevity of my games.

Proton development was going very slowly before it was in Valve’s interest change that for their benefit. That language make you happy? You can tell me to research all you want but that is the truth. Proton development sped up exponentially after 2020. What am I defending? I literally said if only in paying people to work on it. The reality is, Proton is where it is today because it benefits the Steam Deck. The end result is the same for Linux gamers. It’s ridiculous to say that Valve offered nothing to Proton when graphed out there is a very clear rise in development after Valve got more involved.

Stealing patent game controllers, so you side with Corsair and Scuff, notorious patent trolls hoarding designs and actively preventing small controller makers? Awesome, great showing us where you stand there, that’s extremely telling. If you’re talking about other examples - my mistake. Corsair can rot in hell, they have destroyed so many awesome concept controllers with C&Ds. Oh by the way - newest crime? That was in 2015, 8 years ago lmao.

Risking their entire existence to support an ideal place for games to steal is just a way to get sued by every company.

I’m not really sure what you are trying to say. Every company doesn’t support piracy but many go through extreme measures to prevent it. Opt-in developer Steam DRM is laughably trivial and literally is only to suggest buying it to avoid going through the hassle of cloning one git repository. Again, you are saying illegal keys but you’re not saying what that is. I did mention being banned can happen in extremely rare cases, but most examples when you actually look online are the fault of the user for working around pretty obvious things. Such as buying grey market or working around region locks to buy keys at a cheaper price.

Somebody only using Steamless to crack games and putting them in Steam via Non-Steam is at far less risk of getting their account banned than someone working around region locks and buying grey market is, since you are actively feeding into harmful business. Going around region locks hurts those players and grey market risks laundering/stolen credit card keys both of which affect the developers.

Valve isn’t perfect, I never implied they were. It’s taken a lawsuit (funnily enough, also in 2015) to make them more consumer friendly and yet one suit in Australia affected how they do business worldwide allowing refunds everywhere. Looking to Apple in the EU as an example where one country affects how it does business worldwide I am doubting they will do the same given that they’ve yet to do so for any cases so far.

Look - I don’t disagree that it’s dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam Servers going down would be devastating to many and it’s silly to trust a company at face value when they promise you’ll keep access to it if/when that happens. I have Steamless and keep the really important installers backed up for a reason, it’s smart to have just in case. It’s interesting that I’m able to do this at all on Steam, I have not been able to crack my own games for Ubisoft/EA so I can play them offline and without an account.

Who do you trust instead? Do you only pirate to make sure you’ve got the installer forever? Only GOG/itch for DRM free?

Personally I use Steam because I’m under the assumption that if Valve goes under it’s probably because the world is ending and our computers will be useless. Semi-/s

In the meantime what matters to me is being able to play remotely with friends. It has been huge for our friend group and as far as I know, there is no group remote play alternative available? Anywhere? Streaming my games to the living room or on my phone while on the bus - I know moonlight can do this but it never worked well for me. Controller input with SteamAPI also is a massive improvement and for the games I use it with, my Steam Controller is invaluable having mixed mouse and controller inputs. Cloud saves are pretty standard, but including per-game notes is unique and is now. essential. I don’t want to have to set syncthing to every single folder a game decides is a suitable location for saves, and using .txts or my phone notes was annoying. I only manage my emulation saves now.

Don’t even get me started on SteamVR compared to WMR. Great teams at working WMR, very friendly and communicative - very frustrating to actually play in. The quest is a joke.

I use these monthly at minimum, most of them daily. I’m not a fanboy so much as someone who uses a service that isn’t offered elsewhere. I’d be happy to jump ship from Valve if there was something. The main marketed competition is much more awful than Valve and actually has influence on the entire gaming market with Unreal Engine and they very quickly showed how little they care about the user. The other VR options on the market I tried, the Reverb G2 would have been okay if 1) WMR wasn’t a requirement, 2) inside-out camera tracking sucks and 3) inconsistent hardware makes them fragile. Half of what made the VR experience so good was that I was using the Index Knuckles. Got the Index a bit later and despite the lower res it was just such a better experience because I didn’t have to fiddle and tweak to make things work. I got the Steam link (because it was $5) because I was constantly annoyed with moonlight giving me issues - lo and behold the steam link just worked with no issues.

Until there’s a good alternative, I’m happy with my Steam Deck and Index. I’m content risking my library of games if it means that right now I’m able to play Overcooked with my friend in Indonesia, or end my game on PC and pick up where I left off downstairs either via Steam Link or these days the Deck. These are things that I could not do, either at all or as easily, without Steam.

Show me an alternative that has a smidge of what I use from Steam and I’ll start switching over. Playnight and GOG Galaxy aren’t it by a longshot. None from what I can tell exist except for a single self-hosted option that just came to fruition this year, and that’s solely for installers and a very barebones launcher (it was called Crack I think, hilarious, but I think the project has been renamed since then). But go on, keep saying it’s blind brand loyalty, ignore the litany of services that get used that make people see it as a worthwhile option.

Microsoft actually locked down the BIOS on several Windows 10 S devices to prevent users from installing non-MS OSes with enforced MS-only secure boot.

Have you heard of Android running on x86?

I had an x86 Android tablet and that was exactly as locked-down as an ARM Android device.

But anyhow: I can lock down a x86 laptop or PC the way I was describing within a very short time.

So again:

• Put a password on the BIOS
• Set Secure Boot on
• Wipe all Secure Boot keys and put your own in there
• Encrypt the disk so that you can’t just plop the drive into another PC and modify its content
• Set the root user to “Can only login with private key” and don’t give the key to the customers
• Remove all users from sudoers
• Use chown root:root and chmod 700 on anything you don’t want the user to touch

And if a company was doing this to their products (e.g. the Steam Deck), they’d replace the first 3 steps with a custom BIOS which just doesn’t let you change anything in regards to Secure Boot and Secure Boot keys. That way, removing the BIOS battery won’t help.

There are countless embedded devices using an x86 PC at their core, where they did exactly that. (E.g. ATMs or medical devices)

Also Chromebooks are exactly that.

And the Playstation 5 does the same thing, only it’s based on FreeBSD.

I know that I’ve played it during internet outages, which is fucking ironic considering it’s an internet themed RPG

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

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.

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.

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.

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)