Apple themselves clearly know their bad reputation in the gaming community, and their lock down model for selling software will also not be embraced by many gamers. In this respect a $399 Steamdeck is a better device than Apple’s piece with 10x the price.
... released by Steam, a company with a lock down model for selling software. The gaming world has long embraced the App Store model. In fact, I'd argue the macOS and iOS App Stores were probably inspired by Steam.
Having an app store != locked down. AFAIK, you can run any software you want on a Steam deck without any hacking needed. Can you say the same for any non macOS apple product?
Steam and Apple models are extremely different. What you buy on Steam can’t be launched outside of Steam but Steam is happy to serve as a launcher for content coming from outside of it and will allow said content to use its extra functionalities (controller support and chat notably). Valve hardware is always notoriously open. The deck runs and allows you to access Linux.
Apple is completely different and outside of MacOS strictly controls everything.
AFAIK Steam doesn't require developers to use their DRM and there are absolutely games that you can purchase through Steam and launch independently with just the exe.
Right, you need to utilize the steamworks SDK to use DRM. And even if you use the SDK, it is actually possible to not implement the DRM. Specifically, you can just not run the drm wrapping tool, and not implement DRM directly though the Steamworks api calls. The wrapper in compatibility mode (used when wrapping with another drm scheme that supports after-compilation wrapping) literally just checks if launched through Steam, and if not, requests that steam start and launch the game, and if launched through steam, checks for a valid ticket. In non-compatibility mode, it adds some basic checks against the executable being modified, etc.
For offline games, the DRM is little more than an anti-(casual-piracy) feature, making the obvious copying of the game folder not work, with generic cracks being easy to get online. It is more like games requiring the disc to play back in the day, even when fully installed, as a measure to avoid casual piracy, especially before CD writers were a thing.
Interestingly, despite having a generic executable wrapping system, many games that choose not to use Steamworks DRM are the older ones where source code is no longer available to recompile, or there are concerns about recompilation. I’m not sure why the wrapper would be a problem, unless the games contained integrity checking code, or you want compatibility with modding tools that edit the binary. Alledgedly at least one publisher literally applied a crack they downloaded from a piracy site to their retail release, and uploaded that to Steam, and in that case, I could easily see the steam DRM wrapper not being feasible to apply, as residual checks from the old DRM could cause breakage.
Valve even went out of their way to conceptually decouple the SteamVR SDK from steamVR. Instead they made “Open VR”, an interface conceptually like OpenGL or Vulkan, which allows for more than one runtime implementation. However, SteamVR is the only runtime implementation. But in theory, if a VR game on steam did not use Steam or other DRM, and you had an alternate OpenVR runtime, you could take the game folder from Steam, and run it against said alternate runtime fully separate from Steam (if only such a runtime actually existed).
> What you buy on Steam can’t be launched outside of Steam
Not true. Steam has a lot of DRM-free games that can be bought on Steam Store and are typically started through Steam client but do not really require Steam to be running. They're simply not integrated with Steam in any way.
Not really an open market when one company has as large a share of sales as steam. Valve may have a different ethos from Apple, but both agree on principle of extracting monopoly rents.
> but both agree on principle of extracting monopoly rents.
Steam’s competitors like GoG also take 30% so maybe it’s a reasonable price for the service they provide? Only companies like MSFT or Epic can charge less since their stores are heavily subsidized.
Of course as long as games remain available on multiple storefronts it will remain a winner takes all market and Steam does have a significant moat (though not in any way comparable to Apple) due to it’s social features.
At the end the existence of Steam/(other centralized storefronts) seems to benefit both consumers and developers compared to any alternative option (less risk for consumers = higher long term revenues or developers)
Yeah Valve/Steam seem relatively decent/ethical now (eg. Steam deck being a PC u can install what u want on and modify and repair), but it's just cus the average tech company has gotten so bad. When I 1st saw steam I was appalled, its a DRM system, a program running on my system that has no function and I dont want, + a bunch of online or social features I dont give a shit about.. and none of that has changed.
Unfortunately, even beyond DRM, online competitive gaming is both an extremely popular hobby AND the most direct use case for trusted computing outside of top secret work. There simply can't be a fun, popular online competitive game without strict verification of the client software to keep out cheating, so Steam offers an extremely valuable service in this alone (as do other DRM schemes).
The alternative to Steam used to be limited use CD keys. Steam's not perfect but it's better than hoping you haven't re-installed the thing you paid for one too many times.
DRM in Steam is mostly up to the developers. They provide the API for it but hardly anyone implements it. I'm fairly sure I can launch most of my library without Steam even running.
