tobias_platen's blog

It is well known that Valve distributes nonfree computer games with Digital Restrictions Management, so I decided that I will not buy the new Steam Machine or the Steam Frame in 2026. (I still have a Valve Index that works with libsurvive). Freedom Respecting gaming hardware (except GameCube with a modchip) is much more expensive than the Steam Machine. This shows that the issue is not price, at least one a direct way. Freedom comes with a price tag that has gone up (MUDflation). There are effects of economics of scale (that Richard Stallman calls “copying books in 1950”) that make both software and hardware more expensive.
For hardware a high price is a natural monopoly, for software the monopoly is artificial and unethical. If more people care about freedom and stop buying games and hardware with DRM, the prices for freedom respecting gaming hardware will go down. I am willing to pay for games, but only if the games respect my freedom.

So if you care about freedom, you can donate to your favourite libre games developer instead of buying DRMed games from Valve. Soon I will open my own webshop where I will be selling hardware that I have designed or hacked. I will accept GNU Taler for both payments and age verification. Unlike other solutions GNU Taler is fully freedom respecting. I as a seller will only know that a person is older than the games rating, but I do not need to knew their legal names and age. That principle is called Zero-Knowledge.

Instead of buying the Steam Frame I will build my own VR headset. I will invest high amounts of money in protoyping. The components that I pick should work with free software as much possible. Some components do not exist today, or come with a high price tag if freedom respecting. If the Steam Frame becomes cheaper after many years, I might want to start a reverse engineering project. Without the help of Charles Lohr I would be unable to use my Valve Index in freedom. For the Steam Frame I want to make sure that it complies with the GNU GPL at minimum.

The Steam Machine is also too expensive for me and does not fit into my use case. Many games included in the GNU Guix System can run on an old cheap ThinkPad X200 or a hacked GameCube. As I prefer libre homebrew games, I will not spend much money on Steam Games and Steam Hardware. Besides non-free software from Valve there is also the AMD Platform Security Processor that implements DRM needed to run Windows 11. Valve recently published Windows drivers for the Steam Machine. I do not use Windows and I also avoid Proton for non-free games such as VRChat.