IAmSinistar: SecuROM (specifically the one in BioShock) is what turned me off PC gaming all those years ago. It wasn't until I found GOG that I came back.
Amazing isn't it that companies still think DRM is a good idea, despite that it can actually cause customers to give up the entire hobby?
Indeed. I more or less did that very thing around 2006 after buying a shit tonne of Ubisoft games (the entire Tom Clancy series, plus many others) and being told by their online activator for multi-player that my legitimate CD key was "invalid" repeatedly. After reinstalling several times and getting the same errors regardless of how "careful" the license key was typed in letter for letter perfect, the game refused to accept the key as valid. Searching the Internet I discovered thousands of gamers experiencing the same problem, and my other buddies that bought the games on my recommendation so we could all play multi-player also all had the problem - every single one of them. Zero of us were ever able to play multi-player legitimately online and Ubisoft technical support basically told each of us to reinstall the game and be careful about typing the key in exact (which we'd already done a zillion times).
In reality, what had really happened is that hackers reverse engineer the DRM in games including the license key generation mechanisms and they write key generator programs to generate bogus license keys to game the system, then people pirate the games and use the bogus keys to be able to play multi-player also. The key-generators generate keys that Ubisoft or Gamespy or whatever considers legitimate but which could potentially conflict with a customer's legally purchased key, and when several people pirating a game end up all using the exact same fraudulently generated key - Ubisoft/Gamespy bans that license key and considers it invalid.
The problem with doing that, is that YOUR license key that you PAID MONEY for, is highly likely to be BANNED from their servers before you ever even pick the game box up off the shelf in the store and open your wallet to pay for it. After the fact Ubisoft considers you to be a pirate, or that you have given your key to other people or not kept them secure and someone else has stolen your key. The fact that you just opened the box and installed the game for the first time out of shrink wrap and it's not possible another human being even knows you even bought the game let alone seeing your license key or stealing it from you doesn't matter to them.
They just simply don't care. They only care that they THINK they are preventing piracy.
Myself and every friend of mine that bought all of those games ended up having to go to Game Copy World (Google it) and download game cracks to crack our own legally purchased games to play them properly in many cases, and we also had to install and set up Hamachi VPNs to be able to play multiplayer via LAN mode over the VPN and bypass the Gamespy servers while adding latency to our games. Some of the guys just got angry and refused to play at all.
What they did to me though on $500+ worth of games is turned me from being a huge Ubisoft fan who bought hundreds of dollars worth of their games and encouraged just about everyone I knew to do so as well - into someone who refuses to buy any of their games now ever, actively boycotts them and have personally convinced the majority of my friends to do the same. But we didn't just boycott Ubisoft, we had similar experiences with EA too and stopped buying their games as well. Just about everyone I know stopped buying games at all for some time and only bought very selectively after that, very carefully checking what DRM was used on the games, checking forums to see people having DRM-related problems etc and in most cases not buying games. Those people who were not opposed to pirating games if they wanted to play one of these games bad enough would sometimes go and pirate the game that they actually wanted to buy simply to not have to deal with all of the copy protection/DRM headaches as we did in the past.
My own personal choice was to just not buy or play any new games at all period. It wasn't hard to do that as my computer sucked and couldn't really run new games anyway, so I stuck with playing 2006-7 era games and older from then until roughly Oct 2012. That was when I had been watching GOG closely for some time and finally decided to buy some DRM-free games here and since then I've went apeshit. Now I own 303 games on GOG, and that even sparked me to embrace other digital distributed games mostly from bundles and deep discount sales even if many of them do include DRM. So far the only "asshole" game DRM I've encountered has been GTA4, and Mortal Kombat Kollection and Section 8. The difference this time around though is that I spent about $2-3 of my money for those inconveniences this time around instead of $500 so I can shrug it off easier now and be more careful in the future. :)
So that's a bit of my gaming story anyway. GOG is ultimately totally and completely responsible for me starting to give a crap about buying games again, and it is 100% because of DRM-free hassle-free bullshit-free. They make it super easy to game and to not have to be treated like a f***ing criminal for being an honest person that just wants a good deal at a fair price and no hassles. GOG is personally responsible for being the catalyst for me to buy well over 500 games (both on GOG, Steam and other stores) and without GOG I probably would have never bought a game again ever. I would have definitely PLAYED games, but none of my own money would have been spent on them. How that would have happened is left to the imagination of the reader.
Digital distribution with high quality customer service is the way to win customers and get people to pay for things and be happy about handing their money over. DRM is not the answer. Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar - if you're listening... screw you. I mean that in the nicest way. :)
Incidentally, while I boycott those three companies completely now and some others as well from bad experiences, I make exceptions for any games they might have provided DRM-free on GOG as I want them to see that DRM-free is the way to go, so I will buy their stuff here if it shows up here.
