10 Most Insulting Video Game Industry Habits (That Have To End)

DRM stands for digital rights management, serving as an umbrella term for all of the tools and practices that developers put in place to prevent the unauthorized use, modification, and distribution of their creations.

Piracy is a huge issue in the gaming industry and there is an obvious need to have preventative measures in place, but the ones taken have become increasingly heavy-handed and even draconian, such as the rise of one-time install codes that killed the preowned market for PC games almost overnight and massively inconvenienced anyone wanting to play a game on a second device (such as a new computer).

Some DRM measures are funny. Batman: Arkham Asylum punished pirates by removing the ability to glide, preventing them from progressing in the game. Others are more irritating than insulting, such as the trend for requiring players to log into an account on the developer/publisher’s platform separate to their PSN/XBL account to track their progress.

Some, however, are criminal (ironically) and the worst of the lot is DRM that requires players to always be online. Progress can be lost in an instant if servers or the connection of the player goes down and play can be then be prohibited, even in single-player experiences like Hitman or Assassin’s Creed, until rectified. God help anyone who lives rurally…