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Anyone who plays or creates online games knows the value of DRM. While it may irk you for reasons, games are designed to be fun. Playing against exploiters is n

Anyone who plays or creates online games knows the value of DRM. While it may irk you for reasons, games are designed to be fun. Playing against exploiters is not fun, and that is reality for games that don’t incorporate serious cheat mitigations. Online games are inherently transient, so the playability of the game should be the first priority, with any efforts to conserve the game taking a back seat to keeping the game fun.

t-writescode 5y ago
That's not DRM, that's Anti-Cheat, and those are two different things.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  More similar than different, IMO. The goal might be different, but the effect is the same. The pertinent bit is that both treat the user as hostile.
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
  The general pratice in the console space for anti cheat was to rely on the consoles inability to run modified code via DRM. A game on the PC could be over run by cheaters but have very few issues on console, until the console is broken. These days crossplay removes that secuirty blanket (After all, thats all it was, a secuirty blanket). The 360 is a nice example, until the DVD-Rom firmware mod was out there things were pretty peaceful in the online gaming space (Excluding people using external manipulation such as network manipulation or exploiting bugs in the code allowing them to get into out-of-bounds areas. Things like aim bots just wasn't a thing). Once the DRM was bypassed starting with the DVD-Rom mod people quickly found that often the only file that was checked for modifications was the .xex file that the console executed. Many games would just have their configs in scripts that could just be easily edited, burnt onto a fresh disk and the game would just happily use those edited configs because the games were pretty much client authoritative esp thanks to the peer to peer nature most games used. To get around Tilte Updates / Server side game configs people would use scripts which were still loaded off disk to change the TU/server side loaded config values back to what ever they wanted after the game had loaded/fetched them. The JTAG & Reset glitch hacks gave cheats more freedom as a) they didn't have to burn a new DVD with every change they wanted to make b) gave them even more freedom on the system to change things as they were basically "root". My point being that many console games at the time used the consoles DRM as their anti-cheat, once one was broken, so was the other.
naikrovek 5y ago
there are LOTS of single player games. I explicitly do not play multiplayer games unless they are cooperative, and even in those cases, I play alone. lumping competitive multiplayer games in with single-player games, then saying DRM is required is all nonsense. anti-cheat measures and DRM are different things.

t-writescode 5y ago

That's not DRM, that's Anti-Cheat, and those are two different things.

Karunamon 5y ago
More similar than different, IMO. The goal might be different, but the effect is the same. The pertinent bit is that both treat the user as hostile.
Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
The general pratice in the console space for anti cheat was to rely on the consoles inability to run modified code via DRM. A game on the PC could be over run by cheaters but have very few issues on console, until the console is broken. These days crossplay removes that secuirty blanket (After all, thats all it was, a secuirty blanket). The 360 is a nice example, until the DVD-Rom firmware mod was out there things were pretty peaceful in the online gaming space (Excluding people using external manipulation such as network manipulation or exploiting bugs in the code allowing them to get into out-of-bounds areas. Things like aim bots just wasn't a thing). Once the DRM was bypassed starting with the DVD-Rom mod people quickly found that often the only file that was checked for modifications was the .xex file that the console executed. Many games would just have their configs in scripts that could just be easily edited, burnt onto a fresh disk and the game would just happily use those edited configs because the games were pretty much client authoritative esp thanks to the peer to peer nature most games used. To get around Tilte Updates / Server side game configs people would use scripts which were still loaded off disk to change the TU/server side loaded config values back to what ever they wanted after the game had loaded/fetched them. The JTAG & Reset glitch hacks gave cheats more freedom as a) they didn't have to burn a new DVD with every change they wanted to make b) gave them even more freedom on the system to change things as they were basically "root". My point being that many console games at the time used the consoles DRM as their anti-cheat, once one was broken, so was the other.

naikrovek 5y ago

there are LOTS of single player games. I explicitly do not play multiplayer games unless they are cooperative, and even in those cases, I play alone. lumping competitive multiplayer games in with single-player games, then saying DRM is required is all nonsense. anti-cheat measures and DRM are different things.