Steam is the ultimate example that piracy is a service problem
Buy a $20 USB C dock with an HDMI port, start "Offline mode" on the steam deck, child plugs into TV and plays game just fine, you go upstairs and play game just fine.
Alternatively, turn off internet on your personal computer and play game, and let the little one use wireless streaming to your TV.
Basically, one of them has to be in offline mode. That is a stupid thing, but valve intends for "offline mode" to be a day to day use case of the Steam Deck
The simple answer is any game you can play without a wifi connection can be played in offline mode.
i am just trying to understand how that would work.
as far as i can tell there is really no reason for this not to work as long as those games don't use steam services that require an active steam login.
i can run multiple steam multiplayer games in parallel on the same machine, so why shouldn't i be able to do this on multiple machines? the same as if i buy multiple games independently. steam, and any other platform is a game license manager. as steam allows me to use one license for a game on multiple machines, it should not be a licensing problem to play a different game on a different machine on the same account.
i don't have steam on multiple machines so i can't test it, but what i could test is that games are able to access the network even if steam is offline.
what doesn't work in offline mode is logging into games that use the steam account as identification, or that connect the game account to the steam account. but even those do seem to continue to work if the steam client goes offline after logging in. games that do not use the steam account should allow logging in even from offline mode.
On the other hand, multiple Game Boy consoles in the same household were more common.
So yeah, it should be better now that the physical limitation is broken. You have several games and should be able to play them at the same time.
I guess I just don’t get the business reasons for it.
People don't pirate PS5 games not because Sony's service is so good, but because the device is so secure that piracy is virtually impossible on it, so getting games the legal way is also the only way.
The PC was and still is, way too open for that to be achievable, though they have tried with various malware DRM, including Sony. With the PC being so open, it became a battleground to competition, which led to prices being so low.
I think Gabe's original assessment is mostly correct - making things easily obtainable is more important than making them free.
I never claimed that DRM was the only reason.
>making things easily obtainable is more important than making them free
No, it's because of competition. The PC being so open and not locked down to a single entity who can engage in rent-seeking like the console vendors, means not just piracy but an unlimited ways and sources you can get media on the device which means competition, which drives down prices.
Anyone I knew with a PS2 had it 'chipped' and only had pirated games because the price of the console (which was also a DVD player) was more easily digestible than the price of original games which came at huge mark-ups to compensate for the console HW which were sold at a loss in the eerier stages.
Steam: Is kinda reasonable with keeping me logged in ON MY OWN DAMN HARDWARE.
Ubisoft Connect: Hi, it's you. You seem to have a different IP after your ISP's 24h disconnect. PLEASE LOG IN to play this single player game.
But then you have companies like Square Enix where their website process to buy a game was so convoluted that people went to Steam just because it was 5 clicks and not 50.
I like that if a patch comes out which fixes bugs and adds features, I'm guaranteed that it works immediately. I don't have to wait for a new version of the crack to come out that cracks the new version.
I like that multiplayer always works.
I like that I can access the Steam Workshop.
I like never having to worry if the latest crack is going to include malware.
None of that is guaranteed if I pirate the game.
As a side note, I just discovered that GameCopyWorld not only still exists, it's still using the same style as it did 20 years ago.
First you needed to go to a physical store miles away and once you got there the game you wanted may have been sold out. And then there was seldom any sales, except the box of mixed five-year-old games no one wanted by the counter (only $1.99) that you could rummage through and hopefully find a gem. "Darn, they were out of Half-Life[1] but maybe this copy of Strike Squad[2] will be fun while I wait for two weeks for the next batch of Half-Life?" Also note that while a five-year-old game today will barely look dated, back in those days it's the difference between [1] and [3]. Then when you came home to finally install the game, the CD was scratched and the game wouldn't install. And typically the installer didn't notice this until it had reached 95% after 45 minutes of waiting. The StarCraft CDs were notoriously bad in this respect and you needed to treat them like delicate flower petals. "Eh, my StarCraft CD no longer works, can I borrow yours? NOO!"
So for those of us, who pirated StarCraft after the third authentic CD had broken down, Steam was a godsend.
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/155/half-life/screenshots/ [2] https://www.mobygames.com/game/9899/strike-squad/screenshots... [3] https://www.mobygames.com/game/1068/doom/screenshots/