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.
Honestly, this is what will eventually bring me to abandon Spotify. It sucks so hard not being able to listen to that one weird niche song you stumbled upon, but instantly fell in love with. And they never tell you “Hey, our license for this song is running out in six weeks and we won’t renew it. Better listen to it again while it lasts.”.
I wish I could just buy all the songs I favorited on Spotify and not have to deal with any of this absolute nonsense.
At the same time their recommendation engine is extremely good and that’s what makes it hard to abandon Spotify completely for me.
I’m going to get downvoted to hell for half but as a long time Spotify user, I switched to YouTube music last year because of the recommendations. I guess it depends on what it listen to, but I found that Spotify if I listened to one thing for a while and then wanted to go back to what I was listening to a couple months ago, all my recommendations were the new thing, like they decided I just didn’t like the old thing anymore 🙁
If you want to try some niche music service there is resonate.coop which encourages exploration by making it cheap to listen to a song once. However, if you like the song and keep going back to it it will be considered “purchased” and you will no longer be charged when you listen to it. Last I checked there was no offline mode for purchased songs but they were working on it.
Link is broken.
If you need something to cover that gap, MusicBee supports using Last.fm to report back what’re you’re listening to and their service will provide the same kind of tailored recommendations. They’ve been around for over a decade, their trends are pretty good at suggesting new songs.