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.
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?
I think they’re talking about the OG one not whatever they’re doing since then and they’re 100% correct. Every track on the Ipod nano I had was pirated. Idk what apple has done since then because that was the only apple device I ever used at all and I ended up replacing it with PSP but they did originally benefit from piracy because I wouldn’t have bought it if I wasn’t able to add my own music like that.
What? I’ve been using iPhones with pirated songs for 10+ years and never had this happen.
Genuinely curious, I know Apple does shit like that sometimes so I wouldn’t put it past them, but I’ve never seen happen or heard about this.
How is your comment at all relevant to the idea of Apple benefiting from piracy?
Is that a rhetorical question? I’ve had a few Apple products mostly in the past or issued to me from when, but I prefer android even when it can be disappointing to me sometimes. Was launching into nandroid via Haret when Windows Mobile devices were a thing too. I don’t prefer Apple stuff but whether it be sincere or perhaps theatrics, it seems like you’ve got an unnecessary and over aggressive revulsion towards them.
Then again, music streaming services pretty much removed music piracy from mainstream usage altogether. Obviously people in this sub still pirate music, but it’s so uncommon nowadays, I’m sure many people wouldn’t even know where or how to find it.