Activision Blizzard has elected to leave the ranks of the PC Gaming Alliance, a coalition of PC developers and hardware manufactures devoted promoting PC gaming, and SecuROM has stepped up to take its place as the PCGA’s newest member.

No official explanation for Acitivion Blizzard’s abrupt departure has been officially announced.

The news has caused many gamers to stop and scratch their heads in befuddlement. The Blizzard portion of Activision Blizzard has been a long time supporter of the PC, developing some of the most popular titles to ever grace the platform.
Blizzard’s Starcraft is still played regularly as a professional sport internationally, and its MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has a large subscriber base of over 10 million users.

SecuROM, on the other hand, is responsible for the anti-piracy DRM that companies like Electronic Arts implement to prevent users from making illegal copies of their games. However, many gamers have accused the methods used by SecuROM (which include limiting the number of times a game can be installed) as being invasive and unfair. Game developers, however, defend using using anti-piracy software to protect their games, citing examples like Electronic Art’s Spore which has been illegally downloaded an estimate 1.7 million times through BitTorrent clients.

Ironically, many gamers who pirated Spore claim that they only did so because Spore had SecuROM on it to begin with.

Though SecuROM may seem like an unlikely member to join the PCGA (which includes companies like Nvidia, AMD, Epic Games, and Capcom), the PCGA has explained that they do not discriminate against applicants. If the company is a member of the PC gaming world and willing to pay their membership fees, then they are free to join.