Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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...

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!

Steam is kind of the last vestige of the old capitalist propaganda. Like bell labs.

They're the best case of the other side, and it feels weird attacking them, even when they fucking suck. Which they regularly do. They're the bad guys,even if they're the least bad guys.

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.

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.

Lemmy is disproportionately made up of Linux users and I think many of us appreciate how much simpler and easier Steam (or the work of Steam) has made gaming for us or people we know. Also, I think it's a bit of a misconception on your part that because we have some level of interest in piracy we must therefore be stoutly against anything which appears to conflict with that. I pirate because it's a way to save money and, sometimes, a better service too, but I'm not an activist or evangelical in my support for it. Piracy is never going to be the solution for everyone and having some simpler and less intimidating alternatives out there is a good thing, even if they are far from perfect and could deteriorate at some point in the future.

I just agree with most of the criticism. I don't even find steam as convenient as people claim. The ui is weird and cluttered. I don't want to watch live streams, have constant updates, etc. I just want to play some game and delete if after I'm done, without even having to log in anywhere. Also, since I'm on low end hardware, I don't want additional software running in the background

I pirate everything but software, partially because there’s actually a malware risk there and partially because steam actually has a lot of value compared to the official methods to consume other types of media. I pirate video because even though I have a dv monitor and surround sound it’s nearly impossible to get the streaming services to actually give me the full quality I pay for because their drm is so broken, and there’s no way to actually select what quality stream to use or to download it.

So, I'm going to say what I saw specifically in these years. I'm arguing in a more nuanced approach to valve.

For windows compatibility, my opinion is that in the late 2010s (Wine is the overall GOAT, but I'm talking about recent history), the main driver of linux gaming was dxvk, there was gallium for directx 9 but... It was not that good. Dxvk changed the game, the moment I bought a GT 1030 and ran GTA IV on linux (like this guy did 6 years ago), I was impressed, holy shit. Vulkan is low level enough that it can be an "easy" translation layer for any graphics API.

Now we have d9vk, d7vk, vkd3d, etc, all based on that idea.

Mono did this for all .net framework programs (or CLR based programs, if I'm remembering correctly). Gecko did this to Internet Explorer, etc.

Then came Valve and integrated them all in a package called proton, then came the Steam Deck, a console on a muted Linux distro.

To me, Valve absorbed the glory that came from dxvk. They did a good thing by integrating it all and paying the devs, which is a good thing, but at the end, people forgot what doitsujin did. Now it seems that they did some shady stuff to waydroid too...

I'm not kidding, that guy (dxvk creator) deserves all the respect in the world.

And then there is the gambling, Valve took CS:GO, Dota 2 and TF2 and turned them into polymarket. That's a big no no. They improved the early lootbox and item market mechanics (in their favour) to what it is today.

They helped enshittify gaming, they absorbed the attribution (even if helping, because let's get real, they only built the bundle), but they sold a Linux console and helped pay some of the devs involved.

Edit: wording

My hypothesis is that lemmings grew up thinking it's normal having to launch a program that will connect to the internet and do all kinds of checks and telemetry recordings, even check what else I have running on my machine, just so I can launch the program I actually want to launch while this other one is consuming my battery and RAM in the background.
Fuck Steam.

gabe sucks as much as most ceos and steam has it's problems but it also did a lot to move gaming into linux with proton