And in come the people arguing semantics about the definition and quoting the flawed Wikipedia article, completely ignoring the fact that DRM as a term was never even used before online activation...

You know all-encompassing terms often come around later in the lifecycle, right? Maybe to you it just means online DRM. To people dealing with copyright protection, that's only part of it.

So how about this ? :

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121105/17594020942/when-mouse-requires-internet-connection-youre-doing-cloud-wrong.shtml

My Mouse died this weekend so I've been shopping for a new Mouse.

I see a few Razer Mice that are highly, so do some research on them.

Mouse DRM?

You've got to be kidding . . . sadly no.

They can keep this product and do you know what with it - this is as bad as the DRM'd Coffee maker.

companies tend to only learn their lessons when their products flop. If enough people buy that (even because they didn't know it behaved that way), they will learn the valuable lesson that people LOVE DRM!!!! and then proceed to find the next thing to lock down... power cables, perhaps? ug :(

I am all for the DRM free world...but the fine print usually says something like :

Free steam account and internet connection required to play.

or at the very least:

DRM: STEAM

so you should not really be blindsided by this. As others have said once you activate a game you can usually play it in offline mode.

That is very recent, and not everyone is as forthcoming as others about that. When I bought SS:HD, the minimum system requirements didn't even say "internet connection", "Network Card", or any other HINT that I might not be able to play right out of the box.

Don't let it vanish yet! That's what I'm afraid of, lol! I *paid* for this damn game--which is, unbeknownst to me, apparently locked up with this end-all-be-all of gaming companies (Steam)--regarding which I'm a complete [insert your preferred insult here] for somehow managing to (unwittingly) fly under their state of the art radar (Model # GO1984Y2K) after all these years. Now that I have accidently bought/rented/licensed/I-don't-care-what-you-label-it-anymore one of their games, I at least want to get my fourteen bucks worth out of them before they bite the dust! I'll let y'all know when I finish the game. Once I do, then Steam has my permission to go out of business and send whatever self destruct signal hidden inside the game's DRM code that their little EULA requires. (Just don't kill my computer along with it. I've got important files...and stuff.) ;-D

Actually, the company's called Valve. Surely you have heard of them, or at least of Half-Life games? Steam has been launched as DRM and distribution platform for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source (and perhaps Condition Zero). It then grew into a distribution platform for all Valve's titles, and from there, publishers started joining and ... Well, that happened. So the company has been around at least since '99. Don't worry, you will get at least a month to decide that the new Star Trek indeed is terrible and leave it be :-P

I'd heard- of Half-Life and Counter-Strike, but I've never bought them or played them, because those style games (which are the types of games Steam apparently specializes in) by and large don't interest me. This Trek game is an exception to that rule, simply because it's Trek. I'm an old school adventure gamer. Runaway, Gabriel Knight, Dreamfall, Broken Sword--that's my speed. And those are the type of "casual gaming" games that (so far) have not required a Steam (or similar) account in order to play. So, I've had no reason to have ever heard of Steam. It's not my style of gaming.

I don't know if I'll like the game or not. But it can't be as bad as NCIS: The Game.

Yeah, they have $400+ Keyboards with the same DRM - that's just insane.

Oh I take it back, the Trek shooters aren't the *only* shooters I've played. There's also one other: ALIAS: The Game. It's a stealth/shooter, the type I don't typically play (I couldn't care less about the Master Chief)...but making Jennifer Garner do stuff...yeah, that was fun. ;)

Welcome to 2007... get over it! ;)

Oh Steam doesn't actually specialize in anything, especially lately when they allow just about any game to be added. There's a massive library of adventure games there, even some Lucas Arts classics that didn't make it to GOG (I got The Dig from there, actually. It's awesome.)

Well, I must admit, I have found it very hard to download a functioning gaming keyboard off the net, and have had to resort to buying one legally, dammit!

(I'll put a caveat on this - give it enough time and development, and I guarantee we'll be able to d/l schematics and print peripherals. But not yet, and it will be a damn long time before they are as good as commercially manufactured)