Nefyedardu

I used to just seed Epic exclusives. Now there aren't any Epic exclusives*. Coincidence? I think not.

*Other than Kingdom Hearts grrr

You are talking about hardware deficiencies more than anything, you can get those on PC too if you just run low-powered hardware. I'm more talking about bugs. Maybe it's changed since I used Windows years ago, but I remember having issues from time to time with PC games. Crashing, weird behavior from alt-tabbing, some games just running at low GPU usage for no reason even though framerate is uncapped, and various glitches. There's a reason there has been a growing interest in sandboxing for software with docker, etc. Software is deterministic, if you give it a consistent environment it will do the same exact thing every time.

It's the principle of "do one thing and do it well". There's nothing wrong with running games in a desktop but there are limitless ways of customizing a PC and it's impossible for developers to account for everything. It would be nice if you could just write some code and have it work flawlessly for everyone's setup but that's not how it goes. For the use case of the Steam Deck where you are dealing with a low-TDP gaming device it makes more sense to have something like gamescope which can just cut out all non-gaming processes entirely. Maximize performance and battery life with a nice interface to boot, and the desktop is still there if you need it. At the very least it makes troubleshooting super easy when stuff does go wrong because there's very few external things to factor in.

Why don't tech reviewers every talk about gamescope? Gaming on PCs has always been finicky because PCs have to serve so many use cases at once and games often have to compete for resources. Gamescope completely circumvents all of this overhead by being solely meant for the purpose of gaming. It's the closest you can get to a "PC Console". Third parties can never make something like gamescope for Windows, Microsoft themselves would have to ship it and maintain it.

The quote you're giving me is Valve-speak for "we were cool with your double-dipping DRM back when it was free for us but we now would prefer you don't add it to your game because it makes it harder for us to sell your games

Sounds good to me.

on Steam Deck where we control the whole platform".

Ah yes, the closed platform known as the Steam Deck. So closed that Valve gives you the tools to remove Steam from it entirely if you so wish.

You absolutely don't own your Steam games. Those go away with your account, unless you're actively extracting and repackaging those files for backup.

So then backup your games. Who cares if it's against the EULA, big bad evil Valve will not find out and even if they did they would not stop you. If Valve wanted to actually stop you from doing that, they could and they would.

It is absolutely a piracy mitigation tool

What is? Steam or Steam DRM? These are two completely different things. Steam DRM is not piracy mitigation tool.

you are not allowed or able to install or play your games without online verification as a general rule.

So basically you want Steam to provide you the installer in addition to the game yourself, that's a valid criticism. The other one not so much, I play Steam games offline literally all the time.

The notion that multiple people here are questioning the fact that Steam's DRM is, in fact, DRM

You are just putting words in my mouth, I never implied that at all.

It's a testament to their PR, for sure

...what PR? lol, Valve isn't exactly known for it's constant customer-facing communication... All of my links came from Steamworks documentation for developers.

It didn't take a genius to understand that the real piracy dampener for PC gaming was availability, price and convenience rather than technically profiicent DRM

Yeah no shit, you think? It's almost like "piracy is a service issue"...

Valve invented or perfected DRM
Valve invented or perfected DRM
Valve invented or perfected DRM

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/incredulous.gif

The branding exercise required to do that and still be perceived as a fan-favorite, user-first company should get a TON more credit than it does in marketing schools worldwide.

You are talking about a company that revealed CS2 by shadow-dropping three YouTube videos and proceed to not give any updates for three months. Marketing geniuses indeed, lmao.

I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill. Steam DRM does not effect me negatively in any way, you are doing a pretty bad job justifying why I should hate it with every fiber of my being like you seem to.

going into a menu on windows to change some settings once is a bridge too fucking far

"Once". Yeah right.

AMD has clearly had a hand in making sure this performs better on their GPUs

NVIDIA's entire business model is brand-exclusive proprietary software. Last I checked you can use FSR on NVIDIA but you can't use DLSS on AMD.

There are different types of DRM. Your original post was that Steam "forces always online DRM" and "you never own anything you buy". This doesn't really apply to Steam DRM. You don't need to be always-online and it is not for anti-piracy. It sounds more like you are describing Denuvo which is another thing entirely. Comparing Steam DRM to Denuvo is like comparing the Wright flyer to a fighter jet.

I don't like DRM either but at the end of the day I can just run Steamless so I don't really care. Streaming services like Netflix have the same thing but it all can be pirated anyway so no big deal. It would be different if Steam actually implemented effective DRM, but it doesn't.

That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.

Steam allows it, but they actually officially discourage the use of third party DRM

Anti-tamper / DRM: In general we don't recommend use of such solutions across any PC platforms, as they may impact disk usage and overall performance. Getting them fully functional in the Wine environment can take some time and add significant latency to getting your title supported.

You might disagree with the Steam DRM wrapper in principle, but in practice it's laughably easy to bypass (by design). The difference between a DRM-free game and a game solely running Steam DRM is five minutes of effort, at that point does DRM even matter?

The Steam DRM wrapper is an important part of Steam platform because it verifies game ownership and ensures that Steamworks features work properly by launching Steam before launching the game.

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.

We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won't work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).

That's an app launcher, not a systems tray

If you minimize a window, it goes into a list of "Background Apps" in the charms menu where the only option you have is to close it. There's no native systems tray.

I just don't get the vendetta GNOME has against background processes. GNOME devs just don't use email clients, cloud sync applications, chat clients...? GNOME treats my Nextcloud sync app (which I NEED to be running at all times) as if it was malware or something.