DRM and steam

I have developed a game using Blueprints. I was curious as to whether I should or even could for that matter, implement DRM into my game, or perhaps this all taken care of by steam. Could anyone who is familiar with the Digital Right Management process with publishing on steam give me some information on this topic?

Thanks in advanced!

The steamworks commandline application (steamcmd), provided by Valve in the Steamworks SDK, has functionality to apply Steam DRM to both windows and linux (elf) applications.

Checkout this page Steam DRM (Steamworks Documentation) for more information

Thanks for that information!

When wrapping will the game only work after it has been uploaded to steam, published, downloaded, and launched through steam? Is it possible to just test with the downloaded wrapped executable in the folder the game was packaged in by the Unreal Editor?

Is the correct file to wrap the one in the base folder GameName.exe or should it be the one in GameName\Binaries\Win64\GameName-Win64-Shipping.exe (or whichever platform you are building for)?

I haven’t been able to get it to work and I’m hoping to rule out some possible mistakes. Thanks!

In my opinion putting DRM on a game is pointless, if people want to crack it, they will, so it will only hinder people who actually bought the game.

Pirates are unavoidable, if somebody decided to pirate a game it is most likely one of two reasons:

  1. They where not going to buy it anyway.
  2. They are trying to look if it is a fun game and might buy it later.

In the first case you didn’t lose anything, because if your game wasn’t pirateable they wouldn’t have bought it.

In the second case you get a potential customer.

So I wouldn’t bother with putting DRM on it, but that is just my opinion.

I’ve also never been able to get this working. It fails every time.

Or 3. They really want the game but are too impatient to wait for someone to crack it, so they buy it.

All security can be bypassed if they want it bad enough, that doesn’t mean you should leave your front door open.

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