Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Well if someone is out there doing it for free, isn't it silly that some are demanding money and doing all kinds of extra work to lock things down?

You don't gotta pay me to dance, but I put on a better show than any trained ballerina.

Can they?

I'm an indie game developer (3 years at current company). Here's a brief summary of the anti-piracy/anti-cheat history we did -

• We noticed people were uploading old versions of our games on 3rd party app stores, so we introduced a feature that makes the game refuse to start if it's on too old of a version
  • When we later updated the minimum SDKs, and older devices couldn't update, we had inadvertently remotely bricked a perfectly functional game on their device
• To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
  • EVEN TODAY I spent multiple hours and an Uber to get my hands on a specific device that was having crash issues because whatever logs I could get remotely weren't nearly suffice to debug an issue
• People were cheating Unity's IAP store, so we installed a plugin that validated IAPs.
  • IAPs took multiple more seconds to process, hurting legit buyers
  • The cheating metrics went down, but because fewer people were buying IAPs, our rankings tanked on various ad networks
• Hackers were making modded clients, so we added obfuscation
  • This made our builds much more harder to debug, and adds yet another step in our build pipeline
• Users were editing values in memory to give themselves more levels and beat the leaderboard
  • We manually banned them from the leaderboard. It takes like 5 seconds and happens once a week, not a big deal
• Users were editing values in memory for more coins
  • It doesn't affect us in any way, at this point we stopped caring

They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.

I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it's still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam's servers for cloud saves.

(The fact that it's hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I've absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)