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.
the comment you replied to:
it is nintendo’s choice disable cloud saves on pokémon. splatoon and animal crossing are both made by studios under nintendo’s umbrella, and nintendo already showed they can exert that pressure if they need to with animal crossing.
saying “it’s up to the devs, not nintendo” neither answers the complaint you replied to nor has any semantic relevance to the titles above. moreover, SD cards cannot be used for these titles.
No, it’s not Nintendo’s choice. That’s like saying it’s Nvidia’s choice when a game doesn’t implement hardware accelerated ray tracing.
it’s not at all like that, and i’m not sure where you’re missing the boat.
nintendo has ownership stake in the developers of all the titles we’re talking about. it would be like if valve turned off cloud saves on left 4 dead 1. you’d come in to comment how it’s turtle rock’s fault that valve turned off a feature that was implemented by valve on a platform owned by valve for a game published and developed by valve.
in this analogy you’re also playing on the steam deck, so the hardware is also built by valve.