What is Steam DRM

[AmyLane]

Hi everyone, I'm Amy, I have a question about Steam DRM, all I know about it is it gives developers the ability to check sales records of their games and player usage, but I'd like to understand more about how it works, if anyone knows of a paper or if anyone could go into detail I'd be most grateful, for example what advantages do developers have with using the DRM.

I love learning and I'm a future developer in training.

Many thanks,

Amy

[Godlygamer23]

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. It's a way of controlling the content that you purchase - for example, in regards to Steam, the games and applications on the store are considered DRM because you can only use the applications/games within Steam.

[Assassin]

I am going to put this quote from a relevant stack exchange discussion:

 

 

It's a distribution system. It allows you to buy games once and then play them on any computer. It also keeps your games up-to-date without having to hunt for patches.

It also has a great community feature which allows you to socialise with friends even while playing, meet up with them and see what games they play.

To answer your other question, it can be a form of DRM, but it doesn't impede you in any way. You can put Steam in offline mode and you will be able to continue playing.

 

When you "own" a game through the service, you (normally) get to install it on all of your computers for no additional fee. No questions asked. No licenses. No CD keys. Zero click installs.

Steam does many offers and offers a number of free demos. Steam also brings an actually useful in-game overlay (which, e.g., even lets you open YouTube or this site without tabbing out!). Steam finally has important social features like notifying that your friend has joined a game (and for supported games, there's a feature to one-click-join them as well). etc.

Mind you, Steam does have some points where it doesn't shine. My main pet peeve is offline gaming does not work if the Steam client thinks there is an update it should download and install; typically you only find out when it's too late. A second point where Steam is less than great is that you need to own a non-free game to enable most of the social features, and they are a large part of the appeal.

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/what-is-steam-drm

 

There you go. That's basically it.

[ved]

Hi Amy Lane, ^^ those two nice men gave you answers to your question.

[yNeolh]

DRM Is like a protection against the game to be copied, it also can have another features because usually is an active component but the main concept is about protection, so, when a user buy a DVD he can't copy it, in Steam is the same but with files in your harddrive so is more complex.

[ved]

Like simulator 2015

[EChondo]

I thought I'd also add Steam's "Steamworks" features that can be added by having Steam as DRM: http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

 

Lots to read there, enjoy!

[Humbug]

Basically steamworks offers a lot of features to devs and one of them is DRM.

How it works is that there is no restriction on the number of computers you can install it on, but you need steam and when installing steam on a new computer for the first time you need to go online and provide your username/password at least once. Thereafter you can play in offline mode.

Since the DRM is optional some devs don't use it and you can launch those games as stand-alone without steam. But the vast majority of devs use the DRM.