They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do.
But they didn’t, because they realized they didn’t have to. It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Steam Deck - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be. You copy it over, you wire it up to Steam, if it’s a non-Linux game you set it up with Proton or whatever else you want to use to run it, bam. You can now run it in Steam just as easily as a normal Steam game (usually.) If you want something similar to cloud saves you can even set up SyncThing for that.
But all of that is a lot of work, and after all that you still don’t have automatic updates, and some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or install stuff that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.) Some of this you can work around but it’s even more hoops.
Whereas if you own a game it’s just push a button and play. They made legitimately owning a game more convenient than piracy, and they did it without relying on DRM or anything that restricts or annoys legitimate users at all - even if a game has a DRM-free GOG version, owning it on Steam will still make it easier to play on the Steam Deck.
I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would’ve paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.
The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.
to be fair plenty of older games hold up today in terms of gameplay if you don’t mind dated graphics (or if the game uses a timeless visual style). There are a few that I’d totally pay full price for a re-release simply because its hard to get them to run on modern systems.
Man, I loved that game. It was the last NFS I played, everything after that sucked donkey balls and required an Origin installation.
Any tips on how you got it to run? I have the ElAmigos release and I think I tried it once but didn’t have any success on the Deck.
I don’t remember all the steps I had to do, but I do remember it being a pain in the ass. I downloaded the black edition from myabandonware.com and installed a widescreen mod (which messed up the UI since some elements were slightly offscreen, but it didn’t bother me).
Besides that, the only other annoyance was the controls. There are actually a lot of community layouts for this game, but the ones I ended up using were a pain when navigating the menus. You’ll definitely want to try a few.
FWIW, here are my current working launch settings for it:
You are correct! You have to put the dinput8 overrides for the plugin (ASI) loader so that the widescreen fix and other stuff can load. (This is the same for all Black Box NFS games basically)
Also, if you’re installing from the original media, you have to update it to 1.3 and then put the no cd patch. In this case I can only recommend the MrDJ repack because it does this already.
However, I highly recommend updating the WS fix and checking out now and then for updates because we do still maintain and develop it. (Not very often but hey, life is life)
That being said, I am also working on improving another plugin of mine, called XtendedInput, which brings native XInput to the game. I’ve already tested it with the Steam Controller and it works nicely. It’s currently a bit fiddly for MW because I hadn’t implemented ingame configuration, so you do have to edit ini files for custom maps and deadzones. (Hopefully I will someday, right now I am stuck on other stuff)
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I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would’ve paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.
The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.
20$? That’s crazy talk. I barely buy AAA games today for that 😅
to be fair plenty of older games hold up today in terms of gameplay if you don’t mind dated graphics (or if the game uses a timeless visual style). There are a few that I’d totally pay full price for a re-release simply because its hard to get them to run on modern systems.
I’m a sucker for nostalgia.
Played the fug outta that game on PS3, kinda wanna play it again
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As someone who dropped put of business school to fix cars for a living, I feel this.
Man, I loved that game. It was the last NFS I played, everything after that sucked donkey balls and required an Origin installation.
Any tips on how you got it to run? I have the ElAmigos release and I think I tried it once but didn’t have any success on the Deck.
I don’t remember all the steps I had to do, but I do remember it being a pain in the ass. I downloaded the black edition from myabandonware.com and installed a widescreen mod (which messed up the UI since some elements were slightly offscreen, but it didn’t bother me).
Besides that, the only other annoyance was the controls. There are actually a lot of community layouts for this game, but the ones I ended up using were a pain when navigating the menus. You’ll definitely want to try a few.
FWIW, here are my current working launch settings for it:
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" %command%So I guess if you get past the installer, those should get it to launch.
You are correct! You have to put the dinput8 overrides for the plugin (ASI) loader so that the widescreen fix and other stuff can load. (This is the same for all Black Box NFS games basically)
Also, if you’re installing from the original media, you have to update it to 1.3 and then put the no cd patch. In this case I can only recommend the MrDJ repack because it does this already.
However, I highly recommend updating the WS fix and checking out now and then for updates because we do still maintain and develop it. (Not very often but hey, life is life)
That being said, I am also working on improving another plugin of mine, called XtendedInput, which brings native XInput to the game. I’ve already tested it with the Steam Controller and it works nicely. It’s currently a bit fiddly for MW because I hadn’t implemented ingame configuration, so you do have to edit ini files for custom maps and deadzones. (Hopefully I will someday, right now I am stuck on other stuff)
Oh shit, you’re actually a modder! Thanks for helping to keep these old games alive, and keep up the good work!!
You’re welcome! :)
I’ll try to make sure it works on Linux too!
I seem to remember that Carbon also doesn’t need Origin, or am I wrong? I also think that it was awesome.
Following if you get any info, I loved that game