[redox99]

Only because it's very hard to pay for switch ROMs. As gaben himself said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

If getting switch ROMs were as easy as buying any other game on Steam, most people would probably pay, the same way most people already pay instead of pirating PC games.

[goosedragons]

It's extremely easy to buy Switch ROMs and is just as easy as buying a game off Steam. Just buy it off Nintendo's website, the eShop or Humble Bundle or wherever.

Dumping the game so you can use it on an emulator isn't as easy but removing the DRM from a Steam title isn't necessarily easy either (especially if it's a new release).

[redox99]

That's not buying a ROM. That's like saying when you "buy" a movie in Prime Video you are buying an mp4.

Buying a ROM would mean buying a ROM. As in, you get the .ROM.

Steam DRM by the way is trivial to bypass. From Steamworks documentation:

> 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.

Of course some games have third party DRM, and in the store it will tell you that before you buy it.

But the problem is not the DRM here. Your average gamer wouldn't care about a non invasive as long as they could get the same or better experience than they can now using a pirated ROM.

[goosedragons]

What system uses .ROM files? Nothing. Buying a Switch game is literally just as easy as buying a Steam game. In either case I still have to bypass some DRM to use it somewhere else. It's not a service problem because fundamentally they are the same.

While emulation CAN give a better experience it can also give a worse experience. Not every Switch title is playable, many have glitches etc.

[serf]

> Only because it's very hard to pay for switch ROMs. As gaben himself said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

how many rootkit-level DRMs does Steam need to distribute before we can throw that comment of Gabe's out the window? They own the PC market, they have just about mastered software distribution, and everyone seems fairly happy with the service provided, yet piracy still exists and most everyone on the Steam marketplace go out of their way to implement various methods of software DRM to prevent it.

What kind of fantasy service provided is he imagining that would put a stop to software piracy?

Safe to say that the comment was plain wrong at this point, no?

[dartharva]

Gaben's comment is related to how you can curb the effects of piracy by making games accessible and easy to install, which Steam undoubtedly does. There will obviously be people still not willing to pay who pirate games, but these were never a marketable population anyway. By improving your services you reduce the relative appeal of Pirate sources for the actual target population of these games, i.e. people willing to pay.

Piracy often wins in cases when it provides a vastly superior experience than official channels themselves. A LOT of today's AAA titles end up giving a massively better experience in Pirate releases than in official ones - Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series, Bethesda's Doom and Wolfenstein series, the Mass Effect series, Rockstar's GTA series,... the list goes on and on - plainly because the official releases are so insufferably bloated and ridden with consumer-hostile designs. Piracy is indeed a service problem. Ensure your services are good and people won't turn to Pirate releases anymore.

[iinnPP]

I have a Steam library like many people (with 500+ games I will never play) and have not pirated a game since installing Steam.

It is easy, affordable, and acceptable to me. I think the user experience can improve a lot. At this moment however, it is my preferred method of buying games.

The service problem is the problem for me. A Prime example being that I "pirate" movies available to me as a Amazon subscriber because of the VPN policy.