Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Cons Officially Have A Pay-To-Press Button
donk@lemmy.world 2 days agoThat’s what Valve says, yes, but those are the virtues of PC, an open platform, not Steam - which is just a storefront and license provisioning service. PC games have portable game files by default, Steam implements one way to manage them. It is worth making the distinction, especially in a thread where the discussion is about what owning hardware means in a service-driven world.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 days ago
I mean, Valve is doing the minimum copy protection for keeping both players and studios happy.
Let’s not forget that Valve also has a dedicated device, the Deck, and it uses the same minimal methods as the PC version. It has a standard configuration out of the box because that makes sense for a pre-built device, but they allow you to hack it to your heart’s content.
Meanwhile there are companies that feel the need to host their platform on completely locked down devices, like Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo, and invalidate your games on older devices so you’ll buy them over and over again, and make you pay for Internet access etc.
There’s also companies like Epic whose game store app on PC are very invasive.
So yeah, Steam is not completely open, but it’s as good as it gets. There are much worse ways of doing things.