Words Worth Knowing: DRM
Words Worth Knowing was a vertical I wrote weekly explaining key pieces of gaming jargon to parents, guardians and teachers, as part of the larger overall GameHub outreach effort. The column ran for nearly two years and resulted in around 60 WWK articles. GameHubHQ.com closed in late 2017. This piece originally appeared on Dec 05, 20156.
What It Is: DRM = A form of copyright protection for digital media, including games, films and music.
Why You Care: DRM is a catch-all term for any number of anti-theft technologies that prevent players from making copies of games they own. DRM is a thorny topic in video-game communities. Though it is ostensibly intended to prevent piracy, DRM attempts are often implicated in game-breaking bugs, and there have been a number of scandals in which DRM technology is used to implement planned obsolescence, to selectively "curate" player communities, or to install spyware onto player computers for "research"/corporate espionage. Thus there are many factions in the debate over DRM, including both camps who object to any kind of DRM on idealogical grounds, and those who agree with the spirit of DRM as a measure to protect the livelihood of games creators, but are wary of its misuse. Intrusive DRM often cited as a reason for pirating games, with a significant number of players going so far as to legally purchase a game, then download a hacked "DRM-free" copy instead of their actual purchase. "DRM-free" is a selling point for many players, who will actively seek out marketplaces which offer legitimate DRM-free versions of games and boycott companies or services that have persistently been implicated in DRM related scandals.
