We're all kinda fine with DRM now

guest · Feb 12, 2020

We're all kinda fine with DRM now
You can't spell drama without DRM
February 12, 2020
https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/12/drm-geforce-now-steam-xbox-playstation-subscription-streaming/

Digital Rights Management. The phrase alone, or just its abbreviation, DRM, once had the power to spark scathing editorials and spawn furious debates in online forums worldwide.
[...] Microsoft attempted to release the Xbox One with built-in DRM checks. The response from fans was so vicious [...]

Fast forward to February 2020. NVIDIA launched GeForce Now, the first and only cloud gaming platform to operate on a "DRM-free" basis. [...] -- a promise that its competitors, Google Stadia and Microsoft's xCloud, can't make.

Yet, no one seems to care.

That's because, over time, we got used to DRM. Every major gaming platform today relies on DRM, with companies like Valve, Epic Games, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo owning players' libraries in some form. In a digital-first ecosystem, it's just easier this way.
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Steam still runs on DRM. Even in offline mode, players still need to connect with the Steam client to launch any of their games. As it stands, if Steam shut down today, everyone's libraries would become instantly unplayable.

Steam offers the clearest example of how DRM quietly infiltrated modern gaming systems, though it's not the only storefront to operate in this way.
Generally, users are OK with this threat -- after all, it's Valve. It's the company that made DRM palatable in the 2000s.
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In a digital-first environment, it's much easier to click a "Buy" button than it is to haul your butt to the store. It's just that nowadays, "buy" doesn't mean what it used to.

The conversation about the restrictive power of digital storefronts and DRM is on the rise again, though it's unlikely to result in industry-wide change.
As long as Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Epic, Google, NVIDIA and other platform holders keep their promises and manage to stay afloat, players won't have a reason to rebel against DRM in the same way again.
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Rasheed187 · Feb 15, 2020

What bugs me is the DRM protection of movies bought on iTunes. I want the ability to transfer them to any HDD that I want, but from what I understood, you won't be able to play those movies. It would have been cool if you could connect the HDD to the Apple TV device, but I believe it's not possible.

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We're all kinda fine with DRM now

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