that's why i use spotify, almost all songs i want, great UI, the discovery algorithm is rad, and sharing a playlist for the communal work speaker is easy.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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This was already proven at the height of Netflix, before streaming service hell.
It's interesting you mention Apple because while I have every expectation that you're correct at the moment, the iPod absolutely benefited from piracy. iTunes allowed you to add your own songs to your library to sync with the device, and iTunes could also be argued to have been on a similar model to Steam because you'd pay to 'own' the songs and there was no subscription giving you access to songs.
Then they started to remove songs you own, and songs from your hard drive that iTunes had nothing to do with it... Fucking apple cultists. You really never see any fault in your chosen god?
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 feel like if Steam dies we're in some kind of end of the world scenario anyway so there probably wouldn't be time to game anymore.
Or maybe exclusively time to game as we live in our caves waiting for the fallout to settle. How many watts is a potato?
Steam DRM is trivial to circumvent, it's basically cheap locks screwed onto the game with security torx, not even riveted: If you have a toolbelt you're already in and every skiddie with half a brain cell can do it as Valve doesn't bother defeating the scripts that are floating around.
What it does prevent is random tech-illiterate people copying game files to their friend's box.
If Steam dies one day then my library would be largely lost, yes, but not due to DRM but because most of my library isn't actually on my disk.
That is absolutely not correct.
Steam policy is if valve shuts it down, they'll give you enough time to download all the games and run them without drm.
Also they contribute loads to the Linux ecosystem so im happy to support them as I see it as a win/win . The sales are great too I spend like 50 ducats a year and get like 9 or 10 great games for that.
The sales are shit and have been for years.
The price of PC getting popular I guess.
Ever tried to buy a game on a console?
Yes, physical sales are miles better than digital. Even better if you shop used.
If you think Steam sales are still great, then you're either young or have a crap memory. Used to be the case that 6-12 month old games went for 75% off and often more. The flash sales died and so did the bargains.
Now Steam is just ancient games at full price until the next sale so they can claim "60% off" again so it matches the price of a PS5 disc on Amazon or wherever.
I just hope that steam stays good. it's great now, but I fear for the future with everything behind steam DRM
Let's just hope for Gabe to live a long life still. Valve is a private company and not nearly as much in danger for enshittification as a public company would be.
Funny how we've just accepted that any publicly traded company has to become shit and take no action about it
Not to defend the shitty companies out there, but in a sense they have no choice. Once you're publicly traded shareholders expect infinite growth at ANY cost to the consumers or the employees of the company. Every single year they expect to see their return increase, even looking like a plateau for a short period is enough to make a huge chunk of the greedy bastards jump ship. IMO shareholders are the number one, most direct and largest cause of the enshitification of everything. Being publicly traded these days is a death sentence for a companies nature and good will.
And its our fault too. Its easy to see shareholders as rich fatcats telling the CEO to "Put MTX in it and make it slow and grindy!", but if any of us have IRAs or retirement accounts, we are the shareholders too. We want the nest egg we set aside to grow, and that leads to the same problem.
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.
It mostly stopped piracy for me, but occasionally I'll want to try a game but not want to support the company, or try a game I know I'll hate just to see what they did.
I also pirated Starfield, which I technically had access to through GamePass, but it couldn't be modded. (I also ended up hating it too.) I'll probably be canceling GamePass though since I've switched to 100% Linux since then, and Windows has made it impossible to use with Linux.
Can you play "Windows only" Steam games on Linux?
Probably a stupid question, sorry.
Yeah, so like everyone else has said, generally yes. There are occasionally issues, but the only issues I've had so far (that see actually issues with the game running and not anti-cheat that just blocks Linux) have been solved by fixes I found on ProtonDB.
Apparently, on average, games actually run even better on Linux. This is due to the combination of a less bloated OS, but also because proton is translating DirectX into Vulkan, and doing it a smart way such that it's actually more efficient usually. So far, it's only GamePass and those few multiplayer games that have fallen short.
Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We're talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.
I tried Commandos (released in 1998) the other day. It worked nearly flawlessly. I still needed to set my bottle (application for running wine/proton with presets) to run in an older version of Windows compatibility mode I think, but you need to do that in Windows probably too.
(You do need a fan patch to make it run at modern resolutions, but that's not required, and it's needed for windows too.)
Super broad generalization, yes.
That's one of the biggest things valve has contributed to for the Linux community, unshitifying gaming on Linux. Proton does an amazingly good job at working on most games. And steam does a great job of making it easier to use proton.
Now there are always a few problem games, mainly ones that use some crazy kernel level anti-cheat (that doesn't work anyways). But if you're curious look at https://www.protondb.com/
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.
That's why film piracy slowed for a while there - when people weren't being gouged they were happy to pay what they felt was reasonable. But now that the gouging is back... yo ho ho.
Vudu, Amazon, and iTunes have renting capabilities.
Isn't it typically close to the same price as buying it?
Yes
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