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.
…?
No they couldn’t, it’s fucking Linux. They’d have to tie the controller drivers hostage to “lock it down”, and at that point they’d hit so many hiccups with legitimate users.
Like they’d have to pull so many things from Linux (in particular Proton) to “DRM-ify” the steamdeck.
And as I think someone else just posted, some of the stuff they’d need to lock-down aren’t even things Valve has control over. Like I said Proton but Valve doesn’t own proton.
Tieing down a Linux installation is actually pretty easy.
chown root:rooton anything you don’t want the users to touchIt’s pretty much the same as Android device vendors are doing.
The…arm-based systems that use a different kind of BIOS?
If even Apple isn’t doing it on x86, I don’t see why Valve would start.
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:
chown root:rootandchmod 700on anything you don’t want the user to touchAnd 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.
you do realize it is absolutely possible to lock down a Linux install? Every Android device essentially is just that and their bootloaders are only unlockable because they were forced to by EU law. Steam absolutely had the option to make a Linux based DRM shitfest, in some ways it would have been easier even, they just chose not to
You probably shouldn’t talk authoritatively on a topic you clearly know nothing about.
Source: I’m a senior systems engineer.
And if you’re going to flaunt your title you should probably actually…you know…say something that pertains to that knowledge you have.
This just seems like blind fanboyism. As great as the steamdeck is there’s no reason to act like it’s doing things it’s not actually doing. It was designed the way it was because it had to be, there doesn’t need to be anything whimsical about it.
They may have done a poor job of explains thing, but they are right. Secure boot is a system that every manufactured computer in the last 5+ years has support. The only reason you can install anything but Windows on most PCs is because the manufacturer let you, but they could take it away in an instant by requiring secure boot and only allowing Microsoft’s signatures to boot an OS. Valve could have done the same thing if they chose. That’s basically how the XBox works these days, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the PlayStation is the same, since it is x64 as well.
Ok so you just think this is fanboyism, your Right and you are maybe right but… You don’t have to make false arguments to say this…
They could have put energy, to mitigate piracy and being in the same state as android devices, where not every user root it to put on it lineageos for example.
They designed it, soft and hardware, and they did no effort at all on this side.
You can see on this, a sign as OP, or you can don’t mind about it and think steam just didn’t put effort on it by lack of time or resources maybe.
But don’t say false things to make your point true.
I did post an exact description a bit higher above, but you focussed on the one detail that really doesn’t matter in this equation (ARM vs x86, even though it’s exactly the same in that regard, and there are also x86 Android devices) and neither read nor understood the rest of my answer.
And you used that missing knowledge on your side to invalidate my answer without even understanding what it was about.
And you could, very big revelation, also just google before posting nonsense.
u/EatYouWell responded exactly the right way.
Buddy, a very large part of my job is locking down Linux as much as possible while still allowing it to do it’s job. I can confidently say that not locking things down was a decision that was made, not a restraint of the system they used.
I’m not saying that they didn’t lock it down to allow piracy, which is actually a really dumb take. They probably did it to allow moding and allow it to be used as a desktop.
It’s not impossible or even hard to lock down Linux. Just look at Chrome OS, it’s Gentoo based, but with the bootloader locked and root access removed, it is pretty much immutable.
And Chromebooks just use off the shelf parts.