this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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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.

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[–] greenmarty@lemmy.world 39 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Right, not to mention they also giving back to community by proposing game friendly changes on kernel AFAIK.

If just most games wold run on Linux out of box at least same as on Windows, i can imagine there would be shift in market share.
One of the reason is needless bloat of Windows so even my for-noobs-distro idles around 0% CPU and less the 1gb memory without doing almost any tweaking but Win10/11 constantly sends calls home and idles on 4-6GB of rams. Other thing is how lightning fast linux can be.

[–] Sentau@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

If just most games wold run on Linux out of box at least same as on Windows, i can imagine there would be shift in market share.

You could argue that this is somewhat true by looking at the protondb numbers for the top 1000 games. 88% of the games are silver rated or better and the majority of those 12% games are competitive multiplayer titles with weird/invasive anti cheats.

[–] mellejwz@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ram usage is really nothing to worry about depending on the amount you have. Windows will free ram where needed as long as there is enough. If ram is not being used by applications it will be used for other things (it will be cached I believe?). If almost no ram is being used it means some things might take longer to load.

Windows on my Surface Go 2 used about 3-4GB of ram when idle, while on my work laptop with 64GB ram it uses about 10-12GB. But if necessary applications can use some of that ram that's normally being used in idle.

I do agree about Linux distros being faster, that's my experience as well.

[–] spader312@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I believe Mac does this as well. If you have a lot of ram the os will use more ram as cache cause unused ram is wasted ram

[–] mellejwz@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Exactly, most, if not all, os's do this.