Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

My hypothesis is that Lemmy is very pro-Linux, and Steam has made gaming easier on Linux while also bringing Linux to more mainstream eyes.

As well, the younger crowd on Lemmy are probably on the younger side that grew up with Steam being basically infinite games available at low prices without having to resort to piracy, rather than the older crowd which first experienced Steam as software overhead needed to run a game that was already paid for.

Piracy tends to be a solution to customer service problems. For all the issues with steam, and there are many. For the average customer the service is generally great.

Then there's the fact of their prolific support of open source projects. Some great like KDE, proton, fex and arch. Some questionable like forking waydroid for lepton and not working with the original devs. And pushing open platforms etc with their own products.

Then there's the largely flat corporate structure which also appeals to many on the left. As something to promote for others to emulate. Which yeah if we're going to have corporations would be better than the extremely vertical financial vehicles of the bourgeoisie.

But there are lots of good criticisms of them too. Like enabling gambling via loot boxes etc in CsGo and TF2 etc.

Lets see:

• Good prices if you are a bit patient and want to support devs
• seamless linux integration nowadays - Proton is a blessing!
• DRM is the decision of the publisher - not required by steam in any way - and the offered standard DRM is so weak that it doesn't really exist while also respecting you as a costumer (no hardware binding, no limited activations and so on - if a game has that, it's the publishers bad decision)
• steam workshop is the easiest way to get into modding by far
• autoupdater for all your games (and mods when using workshop)
• integrated overlay offering guides and discussion forums
• steam input is awesome and powerful, while not being overly complicated, and also works on non-steam games (the overlay does too - opening a game wiki in the overlay is pretty handy)
• switching between offered builds/betas takes 3 clicks
• steamworks making multiplayer easy - rightclick your friend and invite into the running game
• discovery queue is a pretty good feature - i tend to run one or two every month just to keep up on whats new and up my alley
• creates a news and patchnotes stream out of your library and store follows, making sure you always are informed even if a game isn't currently installed, for example when you are waiting for some specific feature / content in a game
• easy managing of your installed games with a good overview of used space and when you last used that 80GB behemoth of a game
• Steam inhome streaming is pretty good and readily available, and also enables mixed remote/local couch gaming; i prefer moonlight/sunshine, but it's deffo more involved than clicking on the "Stream" button.
• Family sharing makes my library availabe to 5 other people free of charge

Don't get me wrong, i am someone who collects game repacks in large volumes, so i am completely fine with piracy as it is. but i also want to give game devs that have created something special financial security so they can continue doing their thing. That means games that i actually want to continue playing after testing them out sooner or later land in my library, at a price point that i a) can afford, since i am a small time pensioner and b) that i perceive as fair for the product in comparison to how much joy the game brought me. My wishlist is primarily a "reminder to buy because they deserve it" list. In some cases this can even result in paying the full new release price (Baldurs Gate 3 e.g, and CP2077 - this has more to do with my fandom towards the pen&paper RPG tho, and i am happy that the game has evolved to something where i can say i am proud i paid full price)

I'm one of the people that appreciates Steam, but doesn't trust it because their good will can disappear at the drop of a cent. There's no guarantee they can't and won't go evil.

They don't want to moderate the rampant Nazis in their forum and games you "buy" are just actually loans. If steam shuts down today, every game you bought is gone. So I'm taking precautions and buying from stores that do provide games without DRM.

Steam isn't perfect and won't ever be. It's pretty, but won't always be. I can criticise the bad parts because I'm not some fanboy cuck.

You already answered yourself. Valve provides a very good service and are very pro-consumer when compared to most of their competition. Even though at first Steam had way more cons than pros (without a good internet connection at the time it was mostly an obstacle to play Half Life) it grew to be a mostly positive thing soon and was a lifesaver when Microsoft was pushing for online subscriptions on GFWL.

You might find some pushback if what you're actually doing is promoting a shitty company like Epic Games with their typical nonsense. If you really want DRM free games buy them from GOG/Itchio/dev's site or patch the game yourself and simply share your happiness with others.

BTW, among other things, Steam Broadcasting is shamelessly broken since they updated the chat side of their client and they're apparently not doing anything about it. Praise and criticism where it's due, they can and should do better.

Steam does a lot of good stuff, and they remembered that the third world exists. It's annoying looking at prices on other stores and seeing a game cost 10 - 20% of my country's average monthly income.

As to your actual question - because most criticism of steam I see here appears to be rooted in wishful thinking rather than any actual logical consideration.

Just because Steam offers a DRM option doesn't mean that it's mandatory:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

I think people tend to be naive about Steam.

I mean, I DO think that Steam is miles better than Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo/Epic and I would say they're probably one of the biggest responsibles to make Linux that much more popular (both for consumer and for devs) in the latest years.

But I don't know what's gonna happen to Steam after Gabe Newell leaves. I think there's a huge risk for a dramatic shift in Valve / Steam monetization and culture. Things are fine now, but that's still a corporation, and shareholders will want to get the last drop out of it just as these shitheads do to everything else.

Can't speak for others but they haven't enshitified and I feel that their offering is fair. So while there are fair criticisms to level in my mind they are still more good than bad.

I very much am of the opinion that piracy is a usability & accessibility issue. I believe that if someone spends a lot of time on a quality product that I very much enjoy, I should pay for it. Even from a completely selfish point of view, if I never pay, the gaming industry will be based solely on the dummies that don't know how to pirate properly, and will thus be filled to the brim with trash. I'm not going to do moral grandstanding on a piracy subreddit if people disagree, this is my personal view. I remember not having any money. I still don't have much really but enough to support some of the creators I like. I still pirate some games that I may enjoy, but do not want to support the terrible corporations that churn them out.

Steam is one of the best ways to buy games in existence. Would I prefer them to not have DRM? Sure. Would I prefer a few other things, like not allowing third party launchers, kernel level anti-cheat, or any Ai generate content? Sure. But the fact remains, they're one of the last companies that seem to remember UX matters. They also are dumping money into rapidly improving Linux as a whole, especially for gaming. If they were not so good, I would not give them money. It is really as simple as that.

Wow thank you, I get piled any time i mention that while steam is the least evil, they're still evil and a corporation, and the millisecond they go public or gaben kicks the bucket, they will be epic lite, ran by a Blizzard CEO. Mark my words.

Centralization is NEVER good

The contribution to Linux development offsets the DRM.

Because it too frequently props up opposing platforms who are objectively worse for customers as a comparison, and turns out to be Tim Sweeney in a mask. One monopoly's existence doesn't justify introducing competitors with worse business models just so their CEO can get their cut of the middleman action. I care about outcomes for end users, and most of the complaints I see about steam aren't reflective of my lived experience with the platform, nor are they accompanied by actual ideas for improving the model.

The DRM on steam means that games actually get released on Steam. The value they provide for me is that I can play multiplayer games with my friends on my OS of choice.

The DRM thing is a non issue for me. If I want to own the game forever, I will just pirate it. GOG as an example - I like the idea but in practice, there are hardly any games I'm interested in on there.

So I just take things into my own hands. Buy the game on Steam if it's the right price and for the convenience. Pirate it in 10 years if it ever gets removed from Steam and I want to play it again.

It’s a convenient storefront and discovery system (too an extent). Some games I play rely on its backend services. It’s never screwed me over or antagonized me. They also have really good Linux support without having to think to hard about it. They’ve done a huge amount of work on that front that would still even fit me even if I stoped using steam and I do legitimately appreciate that. I kind of get the feeling that the hardware was an excuse to do Linux support, like it seems to me that people there want Linux to be a viable gaming platform even if the business case is pretty niche.

I don’t like that I don’t own the games, I don’t like the DRM, but there isn’t really an alternative on that front, except for GOG but they generally don’t have the games I’m interested in, which are normally smaller niche titles in categories that GOG isn’t focused on. The fact that they have a majority market share makes me nervous about them getting sold or going public and their practices changing. But them being the biggest kid on the block seems like a net positive given that the people liable to take their place are so hostile to consumers. Like the biggest critics of valve from within the industry (Tim Sweeney for instance) seem like they’re just angry that don’t get to be steam but more consumer hostile.

I’m not going to defend everything they’ve done, I’m not going to say they’re without sin, but the biggest issues with them are universal to the entire industry.

My guess after doing some self-reflection as a Steam customer... Because there aren't really any truly comparable alternatives, so until that becomes the case people with thousands of dollars of game licenses in Steam are paranoid about the idea of needless exodus away from the platform, as they don't know how secure their purchases would be in the long term under that scenario. Competition risks stability. So they kneejerk downvote criticisms out of that paranoia. I think it's far more that investment self-interest emotion than say, fanboyism of Valve.

I have a steam deck and play on pc too, and steam sync it's really convenient. And i like how after i finish a game, I can delete it to save space, then come back 2 years later and my save files will still be in the cloud, without me thinking about it too hard

Yes, I know there's syncthing, and I use it to sync save files of 1 game, but urghh it's complex to set up

Most folks have already hit the highlights like Linux support, customer service, pricing, etc. another I haven't seen is the toolkit for devs and server hosts. I host a ton of game servers, and for most steam games it really is a trivial cookie cutter application of steamcmd to get a Linux dedicated server up and going. And because the devs built for the platform, the admin features all often use simple steam IDs for game permissions, making it easy to manage that functionality as well with a group of friends.

Basically, a ton of things just work consistently. Not to mention the pricing and early access fosters a lot of creativity. And my barotrauma, enshrouded, ut2004, TTT, prop hunt, vrising, etc servers are all basically an identical launch config with a slightly different appid and it all just works.

You don't get that from the pirated versions or from gog generally.

A lot of people are talking about Linux and the fact most of the people in this plataform are accostumated with Steam, but I'd also like to provide my own experience with it: It allowed people in my region to buy games with affordable prices. It used that everyone in my country had to pirate their game because not only games were so expensive they sometimes cost half of your wage for the month, but because companies had no support for our region. It was a hobby for the rich and it was almost impossible to talk to anyone outside certain circles about gaming even if you pirated. Once Steam came about with their prices and support, almost everything related to gaming was improved and prices in general went down over here, even for physical versions.

Sure, now prices are hiking up again even in Steam, but it's hard to forget how much better and accessible gaming was made in my region because of them...

There are a lot of Valve stans on Fediverse. I think here it's mainly because Valve boosted Linux so there's stronger emotional attachment than your average Valve reddit stan using Windows who are more focused on Valve's pathetic PC gaming client competition like Epic, Ubi, EA, etc.

I appreciate:

1. The gaming compatibility boost enabling me to not have to use Windows hopefully ever again and compared to their competition when it comes to store design, modding, and community features it's not even close.

2. I like their hardware even though I wish they'd compete with consoles and subsidise asking prices and be far more friendly to international customers. Since Microsoft's Xbox is dead, Sony is getting too comfortable. I own a Steam Deck which sees regular use during idle time at work, and I run two gaming desktop computers on Linux because of Proton.

3. Valve being privately owned has been helpful for long term stability so far.

4. Since there's rarely physical game releases on PC it's nice there's so many regular sales and demo events. 3rd party keys still being allowed is also nice, I do routinely find games cheaper in CAD on legit sites like greenmangaming or instantgaming etc. Regional pricing headaches idk.

I don't get attached to brands though like some people do going out of their way to white knight for Valve-kun in this case. This meme: https://quokk.au/static/media/posts/gU/wJ/gUwJWXxHFUmyAHH.gif

I have dislikes. Some of them longstanding:

1. Notifications are still broken on Linux, rarely appearing at the correct x/y coordinates either partially off screen or no where near the bottom right. Idk why, X11 legacy debt?

2. In-game overlay DPI is a crap shoot on a 4K TV. If it even opens at all on Linux. Usually fine, much less usually fine than on Windows still.

3. The Steam Community and Profiles feel stuck in 2008 and have barely improved beyond animated themes/backgrounds. Images and screenshots in general are sluggish to load. Sometimes embedded chromium just randomly dies and doesn't respond to any input until you manually refresh a page. That happened on Windows too, it's annoying.

4. Videos still lag for me on within Linux Steam client with AMD GPU. Nvidia is fine I have two desktops like I said, the AMD one is living room and both run CachyOS. Acceleration enabled/disabled doesn't help with dropped frames confusingly.

5. The item gambling and trading features are a big blight upon Gabe's reputation IMO especially due to enabling children to gamble on jpegs.

6. Steam didn't used to force us to update a game before launching. I know how to manually edit manifests but this is lame and I'll hold this anti user change against Valve for as long as it's a thing. I like modding games, annoying headache.

7. Why is Tuesday maintenance downtime still a thing?

8. Workshop is half baked and I usually avoid using it unless a game actually incorporates it well like Killing Floor 2 did or Golf It! Mainly because updates didn't usually break old user made content. Shitty to navigate, never cleaned up so it's full of broken mods, and has a frankly quite shit search engine. One benefit of Valve's total lack of attention is copyright infringing mods often stay up!

9. The Store itself is okay but Search still lacks of a lot of sorting options including in the Wishlist.

10. Valve is American, so that's a negative point because the USA is in decline and Steam can be more easily censored by nutjobs in powerful positions. I try to buy from GOG first these days because of that.

11. Lack of Discussion moderation. Full of Nazis and 4channers. Valve doesn't lift a finger unless it's a horny anime game. Praise be Visa. Holy art thou Mastercard. Bend thy ass over.

12. Discussions get deleted after a certain amount of time. Big loss was shutting down the old proper bulletin board forums instead of updating them and incorporating them into Steam Client. Discussions are a shitty replacement even if they were properly moderated.

13. Steam Deck compatibility tiers and notes on Store pages are half assed. Maybe not as useless as a Nintendo Seal Quality but in the same ball park.

I’m pro piracy, and anti-copyright (or at least, anti copyright as it exists today). That said, steam is a legitimate competitor to piracy AND can coexist with it.

Steam— Cons: it costs money. DRM exists. Pros: the majority of the money goes to devs, great ui, fantastic networking tools (they literally have invested in additional physical networking wires (OSI layer 1) to expand bandwidth for use in gaming on their platform), consumer oriented discovery of new titles, consumer oriented review tools, useful socialization functionality, automatic updates, easy and simple access to developer communication, easy mod support, customer support/service, and there’s probably more I haven’t thought of off the top of my head.

Piracy— Pros: free, no drm Cons: less convenient than steam, have to be scam/virus aware, needs privacy protection to be safe and to keep up with what the minimum requirements for being safe are, requires technical skill and know-how, lacks all steam’s pros.

And the nice thing is, piracy still exists, so if you need a drm free version for any reason at all, it’s still there!

there are so many companies to be hated for a reason, they have their share of bad things but it's so minuscule. It's not the problem that people bring up those topics, but sometimes it feels people want to hang them while just accepting what the real big tech does.

Steam was the first time PC gaming was better served by a company than pirates. So now that capitalism is in failure state and the majority of people are better served by piracy again, there's a little resistance.

Valve fanboys are a loud minority. Back before Valve was forced to implement a decent refund policy many of these assholes would argue against it and defend Valve's shitty policy. Obviously all those people went silent after Valve changed their policy but it's a great example of how their fanboys will defend them against any criticism.

Cause Steam has yet to become shit. Let’s enjoy it while we can.

This is a piracy-oriented community, so ...

So there tend to be a fair number of gamers around.