What DRM Does and Why Some Games Use It

Digital rights management is a term covering several quite different technologies, which is part of why arguments about it go nowhere. Someone objecting to always-online activation and someone objecting to anti-tamper protection are objecting to different things with different trade-offs.

The types, from lightest to heaviest

Account-based entitlement

The lightest form, and the one most people don’t think of as DRM at all. Your Steam or Xbox account owns the licence, the client verifies it, and the game runs. It requires a one-off online check in most cases and works offline afterwards.

This is the default for essentially all digital distribution and generates very little objection, because the friction is close to zero and the ownership model is understood.

Anti-tamper protection

Denuvo is the well-known example. It doesn’t stop copying directly. It encrypts sections of the game’s code and continuously validates the executable at runtime, which makes producing a working cracked copy substantially harder and slower.

The commercial rationale is specific and narrow: the first two to four weeks of a game’s life account for a large share of its total revenue, and delaying a working crack past that window is worth real money. Which is why publishers frequently remove Denuvo months after launch, an admission of exactly that logic.

Always-online requirements

The heaviest form for single player games. The game requires a live connection to run, verified continuously. This has largely fallen out of favour for single player titles after several high-profile launches where the servers couldn’t cope, but it remains standard for anything with an online component.

Server-side logic

The strongest protection available, and it isn’t really DRM. If meaningful parts of the game run on the publisher’s servers, there’s nothing to crack. This is one reason live service games have effectively no piracy problem, and it’s a factor in the industry’s drift toward them that gets less attention than it deserves.

The performance question

This is where the debate produces more heat than evidence, so it’s worth being careful.

Anti-tamper systems do add work. The encrypted code sections require decryption and validation, and this costs CPU cycles. Independent testing has found the effect is usually small in average frame rate terms, occasionally larger in loading times and in games that stream assets aggressively, and in a handful of measured cases significant enough to be noticeable.

Cases where publishers removed protection and players reported improvements are real and documented. Cases where removal produced no measurable change are also real and documented. Both things are true, and which applies depends on the game’s implementation.

The part nobody disputes is that it costs something. The disagreement is over how much.

The preservation problem

The strongest argument against heavier DRM, and the least commercially urgent one, so it gets ignored.

A game requiring an activation server stops working when that server is retired. This isn’t hypothetical, it has happened repeatedly, and the outcome is that a purchased game becomes permanently unplayable. Some publishers have released removal patches when shutting services down. Others haven’t.

DRM-free distribution, which GOG built its business on, exists partly as a response to this. A local, unprotected copy keeps working indefinitely regardless of what happens to the company that sold it.

The case publishers make

Worth representing accurately. Development budgets have grown enormously, launch windows are decisive, and a working crack available on day one measurably reduces sales during the period that matters most. Publishers who have tried releasing without protection and then added it, or the reverse, have data the rest of us don’t.

The counter-argument is that the cost lands entirely on paying customers, since people obtaining the game illegitimately never experience the protection at all. That’s also accurate.

What to do with this as a buyer

Store pages list DRM requirements, though not always prominently. On Steam it appears in the notices section on the right of the page. If the presence of a particular system matters to you, PCGamingWiki maintains records of which games use what, including whether protection was later removed.

If long-term ownership is the priority, DRM-free storefronts remain the only structural answer. For everyone else, the practical impact on a modern machine is usually small enough that it isn’t worth organising your purchases around.