[pencilo]

There is an important difference between what Snapchat needs and what game designers need.

First of all, look at what is actually successful for DRM in video games. The only surefire way to make sure someone is actually valid is to force them to authenticate(and get data from your server) to play the game. To do this they'll need to provide credentials(like a CD key) and then they'll get the content[1].

Now look at Snapchat. At no point do we need to fake having valid credentials. We are coming in and presenting valid credentials to Snapchat, my login and password, and it verifies those are correct and begins a sessions.

If you want an analogy to game DRM you need to look toward things like hacked clients in MMOs.

tl;dr Games want to prevent people without valid credentials from playing, we have valid credentials already(our own accounts). [1] This is really simplified and you can find many games, like the new SimCity, that the server interaction is small and simply emulated in the crack.