If an anti-Cheat mechanism Digitally Manages the Right to use mods (even offline) then it's hard to not call it a type of DRM. For online multi-player games DRM & anti-cheat technology overlap heavily in functionality anyway to the point there is no simply clear-cut division, eg, an effective anti-cheat for online multi-player = an account ban which obviously goes hand in hand with DRM...

And before everyone jumps in with "yes, but x isn't technically DRM", let's be honest - we all know why we want the GOG version of games and locking people out of modding or the return of Sony Rootkit 2.0 (which is exactly how Valorant and other modern anti-cheat work by installing a kernel level driver before they "permit" you to play a game) is definitely not it.

Then DRM should be opt in so that people like you can choose to go with it. I don't mind it if admins have to use a bit of elbow grease and the game designers have to get off of their lazy assess to make a more cheat-resilient system without going straight to full on DRM. So the server is coded very poorly and they're too lazy to fix it or add a mechanism to cut the connection when players start trying to abuse known faults in the software. Just head straight for DRM. Par for the course. .. they were lazy and never implemented a better system and never fixed their broken code.

Apart from this anti-cheat-business, Absolver should still qualify for locking content behind online-only, no?

Which content? I don't have the game myself, so I can't check. Is single-player content locked behind online only? Or is it just the multiplayer (PvP) part?

A whole bunch of techniques, moves and such, of one particular "school" is only attainable through multiplayer. Some items (weapons, apparel, etc) as well, iirc.

Couldn't find a comprehensive list of everything that's online-only, but the top-rated review over on the Absolver page at least gives a general overview of the locked content:

"but the PVE content such as rematch bosses and loot is locked over extensive PVP grind.

- In order to be able to rematch the first boss, you are forced to reach lv 10 in the trials mode, where you fight other players. In order to rematch the same boss a third time, again, you need to level up under the PVP mode, and so on for each boss;

- You can't level up under the NPC schools by beating npc, again, you are forced to grind PVP fights.

- Bosses loots are locked under bosses rematches, which are locked behind PVP (as I said previously). Same goes for some loot received when getting levels in the trials PVP mode."

The lag bots are gone at least for now because Valve in its eternal wisdom... disabled voice and text communication for all new players. (The little I read about those lag bots, they used the game's audio voice system to spam the server so that it became laggy to human players, so Valve "fixed" it by disabling it altogether for new players.)

Not sure why they also disabled text chatting, probably because those cheater bots usually also spammed the text chat and used expletives like "ALL N-WORDS MUST DIE!!!" etc., trying to provoke people. Valve probably felt they will be sued by some SJW organization for allowing hate speech in their game, if they don't prevent it from happening at all.

Of course that "solution" now sucks for new TF2 players as they can't communicate at all with other players, not with audio nor text.

However, when it comes to actual cheating like an aimbot doing the aiming for you or at least "clicking" the mouse button at the exact right time that you get 100% hits... I think the problem is that it is quite hard to reliably determine whether someone is cheating or not. Even for a human player it is quite hard to tell if the player is just exceptionally good with long-range headshots, or cheating.

The system can't simply determine "if the player gets 20 headshots without misses, then it must be a cheat" because then the cheat program would simply be modified to miss occasionally on purpose. And, if there is some damn good player who gets 20 headshots in a row, against newbies who are easy targets running in line?

Unfortunately the best way to catch cheaters (and others who are apparently there trying to "break" the game) is that human admins can oversee what is happening in the game, and even watch the alleged cheater playing. When an admin has determined that it must be cheating, at that point the question becomes, how can the admin ban the gamer from the game for good?

As I explained before, e.g. the cat-bots that infested the game at least earlier (and I think they are still there, the name has just changed), the whole cheater program was apparently an open-source software that you'd run in a Linux machine, and it would automatically create new free Steam accounts which the cheater bots can use. So it didn't really matter if some automated system or a human admin would ban a cat-bot, soon afterwards ten fresh ones would pop up.

So there are two separate problems:
- How to detect cheaters (reliably).
- How to ban detected cheaters for good.

DRM doesn't help with the first one (unless it is those anti-cheat systems that have high system priviĺeges so it can see if the player is running any known cheater programs), but it does with the second one. But not alone, there has to be also something else like the the game costing money (in which case the banned cheater would lose money because his purchase doesn't work anymore), or some sort of semi-reliable identification that can't be easily automated by the cheater bots.

As said, there is a reason why the competitive mode of Team Fortress 2 seems to be free of cheaters (at least I don't recall seeing any), while the free casual mode is full of them, even blatant cheater bots that don't even try to hide the fact they are cheating or trying to break the game.

Thanks. I updated the Absolver description.

Not really about DRM, but I have actually suggested sometime that Team Fortress 2 should separate gamers who have either paid something for the game (e.g. buying a funny hat for 0.5€), or identified themselves with e.g. a working credit card or a phone number.

Then the player could choose either "I want to play with everyone" or "I want to play only with paid/identified players".

Then again, I guess that is what the "competitive mode" in the game basically is... I couldn't access it until I had both used a bit of money on the game (to purchase an increased inventory) and given my phone number to Valve.

Exactly. That is totally feasible. If you want safe online tournaments, you have to log into a server for anti-cheat reasons. That is entirely justifiable as long as it is optional.

But multiplayer as such doesn't require DRM. There is LAN multiplayer or setting up private, dedicated servers, for example.

You have game where the exe is signed preventing modified version of said exe to run, so it Digitally Manages the Right or peoples to modify those exe, you have other where it's not possible access the configuration of the engine letting you only access a limited set of settings via the UI, you could also says that it Digitally Manages the Right of peoples to changes those value or you have games running only on Window 10 it also Digitally Manages the Right to run it on other OSes ? If you go like that then everything become DRM because everything could be considered as "managing rights" one way or another.

DRM or DRM-free, at least in the way it is used by shops like Gog concern whenever or not a game can be installed and played offline (for single player at least) without any copy protection or online DRM, not all the external satellite things that some peoples might not like. Otherwise you starts having some peoples calling "DRM" having to click on a "guest" button.

Concerning your concern about anti-cheat, which is a totally legit concern, if I remember correctly EAC don't install any kernel driver, and is way nowhere as drastic as the one used by Valorant. Doesn't mean it's "good" and that there shouldn't be a discussion on the potential security risk but that doesn't makes it DRM.

I think a system of tiered servers (plus some kind of community vouch thing) is a good approach though. The "low hanging fruit" will then concentrate on these entry level servers (where admins focus on filtering out the scum) that you play on a while before higher level servers let you in. Yes, it suck for new players, just like rep requirements suck for new forum entrants who can't post links, but it goes a long way towards both helping detect obvious cheaters as well as to keep them from ruining the game for more serious players.

However, for a DRM free solution, players should have the full power to run their own servers and choose what kind of inclusion or exclusion criteria they use. It shouldn't be solely in the hands of the developer or publisher or GOG or Steam to be gatekeepers and prevent players from having fun among themselves. They can't, unless they literally cripple the cheater.

In any case, the goal shouldn't be "for good." There's no perfect solution in anything, security or otherwise. You just need to make a system good enough that it gets difficult for cheaters to ruin the game for everyone. And so what if someone tries a cheat once? A bunch of kids do, and then they grow up. Forget trying to ban someone for good. Yes, and DRM isn't the only solution. From email to forums to shops to games, there's always a wide array of measures that can be taken to detect and slow down scammers and spammers and cheaters and bots. Bots that spawn a bunch of accounts tend to be the easiest to take care of, but it does require some proactive administration and a bit of tooling. "Just use DRM" is one approach that is quite easy and simple but also very lazy.

Great list - thanks so much for posting this. I will be avoiding all of these games, including the multiplayer ones. Multiplayer DRM is still DRM, therefore unacceptable.

One measure I use:
* Is the limitation artificial? In other words, did the developers have to do extra work to add the limitation? If so, then it's DRM.
* On the other hand, if you have a game stored in ROM or another medium that can't easily be modified, that in itself doesn't count as DRM to me. (This is why I consider older consoles to be acceptable; the fact that emulators exist also helps here.)