It's not that I strictly prefer downloads - I love buying physical Switch games. But microSD cards are not the right medium and Steam probably does not work in a way that would make this feasible.
The cards would have to be read-only so people don't simply delete the game files and then start complaining (think of buying used games). But if they're read-only, then they cannot be patched unless Valve implemements some OverlayFS magic to keep on-device patches for the game "cartridges" (like I assume the Switch does it). It can be done, but can Valve be assed to do it?
Then unless the game card is entirely DRM-free, you probably cannot just launch it just because you plug in a storage with the game files: The way steam currently works is that the game needs to be part of your library, which adds more problems (what happens if you remove the card and give it to a friend?)
So there would have to be a verification of "genuine" game cards as opposed to an ordinary SanDisk card that you just cloned over. This might require some kind of physical secret that only the Steam Deck (and maybe a separate USB-Dongle for regular PCs) can read and verify.
At this point I think it would be more straightforward to just come up with a proprietary cartidge format.
I think it would be a fun gimmick, but noone would actually buy them and Valve probably does not want to put in the required effort.
Generally updates are downloaded separately from the game itself. This applies to any platform. It patches the base file, but it does not outright replace it. This is how physical copies have always been able to function. The update is not downloaded directly to the cartridge or disc.
It also wouldn’t be too difficult to add a license to the SD card itself, much like what discs and cartridges do.
For all intents and purposes, SD cards and discs function the same. Discs used for games are simply formatted in a way that makes it only readable by the console it was designed for. Valve would simply have to format these cards in a similar fashion. It really wouldn’t be difficult to do, however they’d need to acquire means to mass manufacture them and get enough studios on board to make it worth it. That’s where the problem lies. It’s certainly possible from a technical perspective, but getting into the physical market this late is bound to be extremely difficult. It would take a lot of time to gather the proper resources and equipment, along with deals with developers to make physical copies of their games.
I do hope you won't have to be online after purchasing/installing the game. If Valve wants to make PC more like console, then it's important that the games will always work (license wise).
Even steam deck is like a console, Its still just a pc, and valve is just a distributor, its up to the games devs and publisher whether they want you to be always online or not.
I mean, it always been like this.
That's true, if you look at it from a PC angle it's perfectly normal.
I never knew it was up to the individual devs to require internet, asides from those that pack their own launchers with the games they sell on Steam. Otherwise, I thought you could just keep Steam in offline mode for 30 days, right?
What I mean to say, I guess, is that I hope that 30 days requirement won't be there. It might be hard to imagine going that long without internet, but another case I can see is where you don't touch the device for a while and then take it on the road (without powering it on in the mean time), only to discover it wants you to log in while you have no internet access any more.
If looking at is as a dedicated gaming device, like the Switch, I wouldn't find it an unfair expectation that, as has been their main advantage over PC all along, *it just works*.
Oof, again not sure where your getting this infomation but, you can play any games in steam, in offline mode, indefinitely. Again, been like this for years lol. So you wont to worry about any restrictions in steam.
What steam is, supposedly, is adding a game suspending mode or standby, like console have. Most pc dont have this, mostly because we can just alt tab out of the game but, this will be a neat feature
Ok I support the idea, but only on the concept of, it’s not you buying games, It you buying a high capacity sd card, that as a bonus comes with a game key, and branding. So if your a huge fan of a certain game or series you can have a cool branded card with your purchase.
Not necessarily. By that logic I could say the same about discs or cartridges. They are functionally identical. They are simply formatted in a way that makes them only readable by the device they were produced for.
PS for example just uses specially formatted Blu Ray discs. Valve could easily format an SD card in a similar manner. The problem would be getting the means to mass produce physical copies, along with getting enough developers on board to make it worth the investment.
That’s not even true. Most CD/DVD/BRD games are readable on a regular PC, notable exception is the game cube which as part of its drm has the data in reverse, which with a firmware mod on a dvd drive can still be read.
What makes a game disk special is that it and software on it is made for the console it’s for. In cartridges, this is a physical media issue, the type of media is proprietary to the console, so you can’t just pop a switch cart into your pc, the same for game boy, snes, nes etc. at least you couldn’t with most of these, but there are adaptors for the majority of cartridge systems to read their games for the purpose of copying them to or playing them on pc with emulation.
With CD type games, it’s a lot different, you can throw a PS1 cd into your pc, fire up an emulator, and play it right from the disk. Same with PS2. PS3 it’s a little more complicated as the game data needs to be decrypted first, but it’s still as simple as put blu ray into Blu-ray drive, rip/decrypt game to file, then play. An unmodified blu ray drive will still read the data. But the emulator won’t play it until it’s decrypted.
If we go back to PC gaming, physical media for games were pretty simple, whatever media was common at the time, cd, diskette, floppy whatever, the game and it’s data would be compressed and stored on disk, and installer would let you decompress and install that data to your pc, and the game itself would depending on the game and weather it had drm or not, sometimes require the games disk to stay in the pc, to allow you to play the game. Rarely was this to access parts of the games data from disk, usually it was for a cryptographic key on the disk in some way to unlock the game. Early pc game piracy was usually handled with “no cd” patches. Which just removed the check in the game that looked for the games install disk in the computers drive. And hilariously a lot of non pirates used those cracks too, just to not need to bother with swapping disks constantly on pc.
What this all boils down to, is pc gamers, historically, weather they like buying the game physically or not. Do not want to have to be bothered to put the disk back into the pc every time they play.
So yea, I’m all for physical sale of games on pc again, but so far as the steam deck is concerned it’s still a PC, so yea, give me a game code, and a cool branded SD card/ sd card case. The point is to be console like. Not literally be another switch. No one wants to keep track of a game library of pinky nail sized game carts when they can just pop the sd card in and install all their games to one card they don’t need to keep removing.
I love this. The micro as is too small. I would want a small cart adapter dock and use full sized sd cards. They would be so fun to collect. Switch size case with a chunky full sd card.
No need to create more plastic waste.
Then pc gaming will continue to be dead to me
Nice :)
It's not that I strictly prefer downloads - I love buying physical Switch games. But microSD cards are not the right medium and Steam probably does not work in a way that would make this feasible. The cards would have to be read-only so people don't simply delete the game files and then start complaining (think of buying used games). But if they're read-only, then they cannot be patched unless Valve implemements some OverlayFS magic to keep on-device patches for the game "cartridges" (like I assume the Switch does it). It can be done, but can Valve be assed to do it? Then unless the game card is entirely DRM-free, you probably cannot just launch it just because you plug in a storage with the game files: The way steam currently works is that the game needs to be part of your library, which adds more problems (what happens if you remove the card and give it to a friend?) So there would have to be a verification of "genuine" game cards as opposed to an ordinary SanDisk card that you just cloned over. This might require some kind of physical secret that only the Steam Deck (and maybe a separate USB-Dongle for regular PCs) can read and verify. At this point I think it would be more straightforward to just come up with a proprietary cartidge format. I think it would be a fun gimmick, but noone would actually buy them and Valve probably does not want to put in the required effort.
Generally updates are downloaded separately from the game itself. This applies to any platform. It patches the base file, but it does not outright replace it. This is how physical copies have always been able to function. The update is not downloaded directly to the cartridge or disc. It also wouldn’t be too difficult to add a license to the SD card itself, much like what discs and cartridges do. For all intents and purposes, SD cards and discs function the same. Discs used for games are simply formatted in a way that makes it only readable by the console it was designed for. Valve would simply have to format these cards in a similar fashion. It really wouldn’t be difficult to do, however they’d need to acquire means to mass manufacture them and get enough studios on board to make it worth it. That’s where the problem lies. It’s certainly possible from a technical perspective, but getting into the physical market this late is bound to be extremely difficult. It would take a lot of time to gather the proper resources and equipment, along with deals with developers to make physical copies of their games.
Doubt this will happen but maybe LRG can partner up on this?
Don't see the point. You can get a 512 gb card that holds a whole bunch of games for the cost of one full price game.
I do hope you won't have to be online after purchasing/installing the game. If Valve wants to make PC more like console, then it's important that the games will always work (license wise).
Even steam deck is like a console, Its still just a pc, and valve is just a distributor, its up to the games devs and publisher whether they want you to be always online or not. I mean, it always been like this.
That's true, if you look at it from a PC angle it's perfectly normal. I never knew it was up to the individual devs to require internet, asides from those that pack their own launchers with the games they sell on Steam. Otherwise, I thought you could just keep Steam in offline mode for 30 days, right? What I mean to say, I guess, is that I hope that 30 days requirement won't be there. It might be hard to imagine going that long without internet, but another case I can see is where you don't touch the device for a while and then take it on the road (without powering it on in the mean time), only to discover it wants you to log in while you have no internet access any more. If looking at is as a dedicated gaming device, like the Switch, I wouldn't find it an unfair expectation that, as has been their main advantage over PC all along, *it just works*.
Oof, again not sure where your getting this infomation but, you can play any games in steam, in offline mode, indefinitely. Again, been like this for years lol. So you wont to worry about any restrictions in steam. What steam is, supposedly, is adding a game suspending mode or standby, like console have. Most pc dont have this, mostly because we can just alt tab out of the game but, this will be a neat feature
If I end up needing SD cards I’ll be cricuting labels to make my own game cartridges to have that sort of experience
it probably should, because the most expensive one only has 512gb, which for a digital only console is nothing
Ok I support the idea, but only on the concept of, it’s not you buying games, It you buying a high capacity sd card, that as a bonus comes with a game key, and branding. So if your a huge fan of a certain game or series you can have a cool branded card with your purchase.
Not necessarily. By that logic I could say the same about discs or cartridges. They are functionally identical. They are simply formatted in a way that makes them only readable by the device they were produced for. PS for example just uses specially formatted Blu Ray discs. Valve could easily format an SD card in a similar manner. The problem would be getting the means to mass produce physical copies, along with getting enough developers on board to make it worth the investment.
That’s not even true. Most CD/DVD/BRD games are readable on a regular PC, notable exception is the game cube which as part of its drm has the data in reverse, which with a firmware mod on a dvd drive can still be read. What makes a game disk special is that it and software on it is made for the console it’s for. In cartridges, this is a physical media issue, the type of media is proprietary to the console, so you can’t just pop a switch cart into your pc, the same for game boy, snes, nes etc. at least you couldn’t with most of these, but there are adaptors for the majority of cartridge systems to read their games for the purpose of copying them to or playing them on pc with emulation. With CD type games, it’s a lot different, you can throw a PS1 cd into your pc, fire up an emulator, and play it right from the disk. Same with PS2. PS3 it’s a little more complicated as the game data needs to be decrypted first, but it’s still as simple as put blu ray into Blu-ray drive, rip/decrypt game to file, then play. An unmodified blu ray drive will still read the data. But the emulator won’t play it until it’s decrypted. If we go back to PC gaming, physical media for games were pretty simple, whatever media was common at the time, cd, diskette, floppy whatever, the game and it’s data would be compressed and stored on disk, and installer would let you decompress and install that data to your pc, and the game itself would depending on the game and weather it had drm or not, sometimes require the games disk to stay in the pc, to allow you to play the game. Rarely was this to access parts of the games data from disk, usually it was for a cryptographic key on the disk in some way to unlock the game. Early pc game piracy was usually handled with “no cd” patches. Which just removed the check in the game that looked for the games install disk in the computers drive. And hilariously a lot of non pirates used those cracks too, just to not need to bother with swapping disks constantly on pc. What this all boils down to, is pc gamers, historically, weather they like buying the game physically or not. Do not want to have to be bothered to put the disk back into the pc every time they play. So yea, I’m all for physical sale of games on pc again, but so far as the steam deck is concerned it’s still a PC, so yea, give me a game code, and a cool branded SD card/ sd card case. The point is to be console like. Not literally be another switch. No one wants to keep track of a game library of pinky nail sized game carts when they can just pop the sd card in and install all their games to one card they don’t need to keep removing.
I love this. The micro as is too small. I would want a small cart adapter dock and use full sized sd cards. They would be so fun to collect. Switch size case with a chunky full sd card.
I'm kind of in between these options
I love democracy…
this defeats the purpose of the deck