Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator
gamedeveloper.com
gamedeveloper.com
Edit: I guess I didn't realize Portal was on Switch.
Valve is not selling a walled garden product and if you are expecting them to administer the steam deck like one you will be disappointed. If that's not for you then you should not go into business with Valve - it would be painful for both parties.
Despite the video being retracted the desired effect has been achieved. The flurry of news has more lay people thinking about the Steam Deck in the same class as the Switch, even if their intent is not to emulate.
Things MAY work out to the benefit of regular users ( though often they work out to the benefit of those with best lawyers ). All I am saying is, if push comes to shove, as much as I would like to believe Gabe will actually fight this should Nintendo go after them somehow ( and I will actually spend money on Steam to fund it if needed ), it would have been so much better if it stayed a hobbyist thing.
Edit: And for the record. I love my Deck. I love that in the sea of closed off crap, Steam made it all this magic come together.
Emulating the Switch specifically is maybe a niche thing because the emulators are relatively new, the system is still sold and you can easily buy the games.
<<Emulation hasn't been a niche thing since the 90s, emulating older systems has always been wildly popular.
Compared to today it was popular amongst some enthusiasts, who already self-selected from perceived social outcasts. Gaming has only recently become more mainstream, socially acceptable AND ridiculously profitable.
The target is that much bigger. I stand by my 'it used to be a niche', because even being interested in computers was not a mainstream interest.
[1]https://www.gameskinny.com/ggtms/10-best-video-game-commerci...
edit:
Seems I was off with a billion number, but it is still nowhere near 2017's 100b global video game industry estimate.
And this is because Steam's model is broadly superior, for the simple fact that respects both creators and users autonomy more.
Nintendo can catch up to the times or Nintendo can get it's lunch eaten. But that's on them.
This is where I think the disconnect lies. You think it is about competition and business model. You think the best product wins. You think that just because Steam's product is better, it automatically follows that they would not be subject to whims and vagaries of the court systems ( yes, systems ). Creators and users are not meaningless, but serve as mere pawns to be traded between warring corporate entities. As users, best we can hope for is that current retarded copyrights are not enforced harder than they are already.
Nintendo's financial status is public knowledge as they are a public company. Steam's profit and warchest is unknown, but estimated below Nintendo. In short, if both sides dig in, it could be a while.
I am fine with Nintendo going down as a result of that potential fight, but are you ok with it being a pyrrhic victory, where US legal copyright landscape changes further to the user's detriment?
Do you care about that?
Definitely a maybe. But I suppose I see game creators putting up a better fight than, e.g. the Tumblr adult material community, who more or less rolled over, no pun intended.
Edit: for accuracy, it's "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work.
Examples:
* Dead Cells has Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dead_Cells
* Hollow Knight does not (will run without Steam if you copy just the game files): https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hollow_Knight
I was vaguely surprised because I figured that obra dinn being a small single player indie title would not have any drm. and I don't think it does. I think just linking it to the steam dll(for steam integration) makes the check occur. I suspect the solution is a bogus steam dll. but did not find one in the couple of minutes I was looking.
Note that you can copy a game to a friends computer then authorize them to play it, so good for valve, but I did not want to set my mother up with a steam account. so did not use this feature.
Another example is original sound tracks sell as game dlcs. They are simply downloaded into game directory, nothing is protected.
This is entirely up to developer to decide how they use Steam.
PS: I am game developer.
If a game developer chooses to implement Steam DRM, Valve will enforce it.
I call that "enforcement", and most significant games on Steam use it.
The alternative, that Steam DRM is used but doesn't actually do the thing that DRM is supposed to do, ie prevent copying, is nonsensical, and thus can't be what OP meant.
Therefore, we are forced to assume that they meant that "non-enforcement" means that Steam the platform doesn't require DRM for your game to be on it, which is true, it doesn't. That's the only reasonable interpretation.
>> Can you play the same game on two devices from the same steam account without hiding offline?
> Steam doesn't enforce DRM. You can usually go to the game files and just click the launcher from the file manager and the game will run without steam getting involved.
Giving this answer to that question indicates that OP really did mean that you can simply bypass Steam's DRM enforcement (e.g. of playing a game on only one device at a time) by clicking on the launcher directly.
It's not "nonsensical", it's just wrong.
Very not sure about that, though.
Personally I'd be happy to pay money and get access to the game ROMs to run on an emulator because I find it more convenient to play them in an emulator than to switch a bunch of cables to put the switch on my monitor.
You actually don't, and I have to give credit to nintendo for this one, there are only a few ways you can get banned (the main one being installing pirated games, the switch has telemetry that sends back data about the signatures of the games you have installed) but just running simple homebrew isn't one of them, you can load up custom firmware and run a game dumper without getting banned just fine. You can even play online with it active (I have done it).
The bigger problem is that only very old models of the console can be hacked without having to solder a modchip so this is completely inaccessible to most switch owners.
If getting switch ROMs were as easy as buying any other game on Steam, most people would probably pay, the same way most people already pay instead of pirating PC games.
how many rootkit-level DRMs does Steam need to distribute before we can throw that comment of Gabe's out the window? They own the PC market, they have just about mastered software distribution, and everyone seems fairly happy with the service provided, yet piracy still exists and most everyone on the Steam marketplace go out of their way to implement various methods of software DRM to prevent it.
What kind of fantasy service provided is he imagining that would put a stop to software piracy?
Safe to say that the comment was plain wrong at this point, no?
It is easy, affordable, and acceptable to me. I think the user experience can improve a lot. At this moment however, it is my preferred method of buying games.
The service problem is the problem for me. A Prime example being that I "pirate" movies available to me as a Amazon subscriber because of the VPN policy.
Piracy often wins in cases when it provides a vastly superior experience than official channels themselves. A LOT of today's AAA titles end up giving a massively better experience in Pirate releases than in official ones - Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series, Bethesda's Doom and Wolfenstein series, the Mass Effect series, Rockstar's GTA series,... the list goes on and on - plainly because the official releases are so insufferably bloated and ridden with consumer-hostile designs. Piracy is indeed a service problem. Ensure your services are good and people won't turn to Pirate releases anymore.
Dumping the game so you can use it on an emulator isn't as easy but removing the DRM from a Steam title isn't necessarily easy either (especially if it's a new release).
Buying a ROM would mean buying a ROM. As in, you get the .ROM.
Steam DRM by the way is trivial to bypass. From Steamworks documentation:
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
Of course some games have third party DRM, and in the store it will tell you that before you buy it.
But the problem is not the DRM here. Your average gamer wouldn't care about a non invasive as long as they could get the same or better experience than they can now using a pirated ROM.
While emulation CAN give a better experience it can also give a worse experience. Not every Switch title is playable, many have glitches etc.
Have people already forgotten what Gabe himself said all those years ago? Piracy is a service problem, Nintendo does not provide any way to obtain these games legally for emulation (and often does not provide any way at all of accessing their games from previous platforms), so of course people pirate them. I thankfully still have a fully working launch year Switch so I can do whatever I want but it's not particularly convenient and most people don't have this privilege at all.
Torrenting also isn't illegal by itself or a direct link to pirating, it is just a very common way of sharing pirated data.
Emulating also isn't illegal by itself of a direct link to pirating, it is just a very common way of playing pirated games.
Just as you can go to to arch linux' web page and download through their recommended method (torrent), you can go play old PS1 games on the PSClassic (based on the PCSX emulator), or play GB/GBC games on your 3DS Virtual Console (in house nintendo-made emulator afaik, correct me if I'm wrong).
I was making fun of that comment to point out the same is true of emulation. However I obviously misinterpreted the initial comment since you're clearly aware emulation itself is legal. Sorry.
2. This way you can buy physical copies of games, keeping full control and the ability to resell them, while also carrying your current game library on an SD card.
Edit: I forgot modding! That's a huge use of emulation.
For instance, I run qemu all the time to emulate various android devices.
I suspect that you're thinking specifically of game emulation though.
Running software on an emulated device is fine legally as long as it doesn't violate copyright law.
For instance, you can legally backup software that you own in the US [1] - that extends to games as well - and because emulators themselves are legal (although you may also need to backup the device's BIOS), you can have a completely legitimate archive of copyrighted games to run via an emulator.
That said, it's unlikely that most people archive software themselves, and it is not legal to distribute backups in the US, even if both parties have legitimately acquired copies of the source material.
Do you (or anyone) know if caselaw on this point and which USC this position relies on, thanks.
Are there details on those measures?
The switch is already weak in terms of hardware so I am not sure how many games will end up integrating it. Regardless of what Denuvo says in marketing, it will slow down games. Nintendo has since tried to distance itself from it, but Denuvo has said they have entered NDA agreements with large publishers already. Denuvo would also need low level access and approval from Nintendo, so I am not sure why Nintendo is pretending to separate itself from this effort.
According to this article, this is an initiative championed by Denuvo alone, without Nintendo's involvement.
They used to sell emulators on their marketplace for their back catalogue under the 'virtual console' brand and more recently on Switch include emulation for NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 titles as a benefit on their online subscription model.
Nintendo: "oh no, how dare you show that your product can do something that's perfectly legal and a very common use"
I think what they sells are more about services that support the game. For example: you can find l4d2 crack easily. But you are never able to join to the official community server list without a proper purchase.
When you are confident in your own products, you don't have to stoop to cheap user-hostile bullying tactics to protect your wares.
Emulation legality aside, Nintendo would certainly be the company I would expect to pressure Valve for a case against enabling and abetting piracy given their history of legally attacking perceived "competition".
Stay with me.
In Europe during the time of Mozart, composers were incentivized to be prolific by only getting royalties off the first public performance of their works. Now that is not fair today because of course we can losslessy reproduce such things infinitely.
However, Humble Bundles (and really, steam sales and other similar discounts and give-aways) work because the vast majority of the money a game is ever likely to make is early in the revenue cycle. Not 20 or 10 or even 5 years later.
We don't know the revenue Nintendo derives from virtual console sales, but you can be assured that virtually none of it is making it to the creators which is who copyright is designed to protect.
I too have many gripples with copyright but this is simply wrong. Copyright is designed to protect the rightsholder. Whether it is a person or a company is irrelevant. This isn't a conspiracy or cynical-type explanation, this is by design
I expect to live at least another 50 years. In a large amount of countries copyright is granted for the lifetime of the author and an additional 70 years.
It seems a little excessive.
Copyright is designed "to promote the progress of Science and Useful Arts."
That should be the first question.
Disney and Sonny Bono hired some lawyers to ramrod some dumb crap through. It happens. Let's see if we can fix it.
The standard set by SCOTUS was, apart from what you've already said, that a time extension was permissible as long as the "traditional contours of copyright" were not altered. One of them was explicitly called out, fair use.
The Court also explicitly mentioned that for a regulation to survive constitutional scrutiny in regards to copyright, it must not supersede, nullify, or even "disturb" the exercise of fair use.
This set the precedent that fair use is constitutionally required, not only a generous grant by Congress.
Copyright was meant to be "time limited".
Why is it that Nintendo still has the rights to works they released over 20 years ago even though they've already turned a profit several times over? Why do they get to sell them to people over and over again?
Ports, remasters, official emulation, and subscriptions have given a longer "tail" for at least a handful of classics but even without that it's "the IP" that would be most jealously guarded.
Trademark definitely comes into play, and is probably the more important form of IP here in practice (and for some series may be the only really effective protection). But you still couldn't go out and make a game with Master Chief or Nathan Drake even if you called it something other than Halo or Uncharted.
Trademarks are also interesting and somewhat unique for video games: the typical rule is that the title of a book or movie, etc. is not eligible for a trademark. You need a name that's being used for a series to get a trademark. But video games are excluded from this rule and can (and almost always do) get trademarks for their titles even when they're standalones.
Some nintendo games are currently not available anywhere (from nintendo or from original publisher), but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictional losses for the copyright holder. What losses? If you're not selling the game anymore, how can you have losses from it? If you're not selling that movie in my country, how can you show a loss from me downloading it?
The entry on the GOG.com wishlist has 36K+ upvotes with a new comment posted every week or so. Seems like low hanging fruit for someone at EA to make a quick buck.
The problem is, a game is not owned by single entity. There were multiple persons and organizations own the game.
Some persons are now deceased, some organizations are now bankrupted.
It's almost impossible to find all entities who own the rights, negotiate the share. It costs more than the potential profit of the old games.
What we need is a copyright exemption law(or recognized as a fair use if you're living in US common law system) which allows unlimited use of copyrighted works(including commercial use) if the copy of the work cannot be obtained from the author.
Some may argues that they want the right to not distributed, but the very reason copyright exist is to give temporally exclusive rights the the author for... you know what? distribution. If the author don't want to distribute their works, it's shall not be copyright protected in the first place.
Also the games aren't 100% unavailable, they're perfectly available on their original platforms on the secondary market if you want one badly.
That is because there are statutory damages to copyright violations. By definition, any violation causes a fixed amount of damage.
An advocate for the devil would claim that those creators were compensated upfront rather than over the lifetime of the product. Therefore, the company is rightfully collecting the revenue that the creator left to them that they already paid for.
Which is a view you’re welcome to hold, but I’d certainly prefer a system designed for people who engage in creative work to have a greater share of what they create, and for the economics of creative work to not be so deeply entrenched in wealth consolidation for its own sake.
Disclaimer: the sum total I’ve been paid for purely creative work is approximately $11 from my share of ticket sales and a couple of drinks on the house. Which is $11 dollars more than I ever sought out, because I realized making a living as an artist had dim prospects before I even got a chance to try.
When copying was extremely hard(back in antiquity) everyone who was an artisan was producing 1 art per 1 unit. So you didn't even need a state-level enforcement of copyright; either it was good work or it wasn't.
During the run-up to industrialization more possibilities to make units without making art came about. But the means of production were still capital and labor-intensive - there were only so many printing presses in town. Therefore, copyright built a social contract: the state enforces what the presses can do to copy your work. As soon as you exited the borders of that state, piracy was prolific.
This regime continued all the way through the 20th century and only started cracking when homemade copies became good enough, which, within media industries now fully enmeshed with state interests, the obvious response was "don't tape at home, don't copy that floppy, you wouldn't download a car."
Nowadays there is no scarcity of copies, only scarcity of attention. "Likes" are effectively a currency, but likes aren't state money, they're an awkward mediation of platform algorithms. Instead we have a two-class media system where, in each form of media, there's "the industry", which deploys all the mechanisms of the state(corporate investment, IP laws, marketing campaigns) to encourage consumers to give up their state bucks, and then the "gig workers", who have assembled a patchwork of social media mechanisms to get eyeballs to their work and pick up commissions, crowdfunding, and other forms of fundraising that allow indirect exits to state bucks. Because you mostly can't get paid for what you already did without utilizing the full might of the state, everyone is inclined to push monetization further towards promises of future work: the stretch goal, DLC, etc. Buying the rumor and selling the news.
In this framework, we have to discuss NFTs. They aren't "ready for use" in the current state of things, but they present an alternative mode of exit: discard the unit production mindset and define the art as a financial asset. It already has some analogue in the gallery system, but digitization makes it a cheap, low-friction process. With "all my apes are gone" comes some demonstration of effectiveness: You can, in fact, just put a price to art, let traders make risky gambles with it, and rely on a non-state, independently operated system to give you a cut of the resulting carnage.
What we don't have yet is strong coordination between likes and trading. What made NFTs a bubble was the degree of misrepresentation on display; far too many works were being inflated through traditional boiler-room schemes, and many more were stolen works scraped from unwilling or unaware sources. Everyone pounced on proof-of-concept tech with an angle for a rug pull. But this is the kind of thing that tech has seen many waves of: snake oil salesmen turning some genuine breakthrough into fools' gold, followed by a gradual address of each specific problem that made it foolish.
So I think of the possibilities for art as a thing society can fund and reward going forward as a thing that will look both more social-media-like and asset-like; maybe not in the specific mode NFTs took, or in the specific form that engagement on TikTok takes, but drawing on some aspects of both and building a greater-than-the-sum result.
I can almost guarantee that this isn't Nintendo's primary motivation for the behavior. There is much more money to be made with xplat games, and almost all (if not strictly all) consoles are loss-leaders.
Nintendo is ruled by dogma, nothing more, nothing less. Nintendo is much like Larry Ellison[1], don't try to make sense of them. If it wasn't for a core set of IP that their designers/developers routinely ace, they would be dead in the water.
The only thing I can see this threatening is native JoyCon/Pro Controller support on Steam (more specifically use of their controller glyphs) if Nintendo want to get real vindictive. Otherwise there doesn't appear to be much of an existing relationship to be threatened.
Putting Yuzu into marketing materials was definitely a bit of a faux pas, but it's also one of those occasions that highlights the absurd pageantry of pushing the narrative that emulation is taboo. It's in the video because there are those at Valve use Yuzu on Steam Deck themselves and normalizing that is a net good.
I've seen a lot of formerly xbox and playstation exclusive titles start popping up on Steam... so you wouldn't need an emulator for those...
No other way to get Mario on Steam yet though ;)
Valve isn't burning any bridges here because there were no bridges to begin with.
Portal and Portal 2 recently released on the Switch
The specs look decent enough and the price is cheaper than a laptop.
That said, it would probably work so long as you connected an external keyboard.
Hook it up to a dock and it should work and perform like a laptop. With a decent CPU, quick SSD and 16GB of RAM you should be able to do certain types of dev work quite comfortably if you hook up a display or two, a mouse and a keyboard.
The thing just runs Flatpak so stuff like VS Code and Jetbrains products will run perfectly fine.
The Linux desktop seems to tweak some things in the UI to be friendlier toward users coming from Windows. Not sure if that's a valve thing or not, can't say I'm a distro guru.
It's not super performant for me on a 4k display, docked. But, it should all work with a nice usb-c monitor, keyboard and mouse, and a dock off Amazon.
Guaranteed there will be something funky in the distro that gets in your way at some point though.
It'd be easier to use if it can automatically do it for you though. Something like, enter a special env, install packages, leave and it automatically pop up an image for you would be nice.
I think this is quite similar to docker image layers except it is composable
But this situation may change after they finished dual boot support though. At then, you could probably just boot into another linux distro for serious work instead.