Steam is sort of tolerable, but it's also a chunk of self-important harassware that slows my computer startup and asks me to verify my email every month.

I started out not being a huge anti-DRM person. Originally, I viewed it as a bit of a perk. There were a lot of fairly old and cheap games here, and eventually it became a place I kept an eye on.

Blizzard taught me how to hate DRM, I guess. Getting banned from battle.net for wanting to run your game in a window is shit. Buying a second copy of D2 Battle Chest so you can mule for yourself with a custom D2 launcher is shit. They're still charging 30 bucks for Battle Chest and moving lots of copies, and they can't be bothered to patch in a shared stash into the game. No, you have to trust some stranger and the servers and the internet connection and hope that your item is still there when you log back in. Or you have to phone up a buddy and get them to open the game, or... something really stupid involving two computers. Diablo 2 finally got a windowed mode some time back, but a simple HD remake? They can't be fucking bothered, even though it would sell. In their analysis, the money they'd lose from people buying that instead of their brand new overproduced trash would probably outweigh the benefit.

I mean, look at the RMAH. That wound in particular is healed, but the game still sucks in other ways they haven't addressed yet. But basically, some idiot in a suit got butthurt that someone, somewhere was making money off of his games and he wasn't getting a cut.

Steam is annoying. I made the mistake of buying Civ 5 on my Steam account because my wife wanted to play it, and now I'm never seeing the end of login/logout woes.

Non-DRM isn't just a bonus to me anymore. These days, the presence of DRM sets the bar at, "it had better be fucking worth it". I'm pretty sad that The Walking Dead hasn't shown up here yet. From what I hear, I'm missing out. :(

If we lived in a world where more people shunned DRM to the point where the lost sales due to disgust drarfed the lost sales due to piracy in all but mega-AAA titles, I'm not sure that it would have a future. It's such a waste of development efforts. Unfortunately, there's probably some kind of critical mass. If you know that every gamer at your HS is getting the new game, then it's a no brainer to go hang out after school and put it on your flash drive or whatever and have a pirate party. People are going to buy Bio Shock Infinite with DRM no matter what. I probably won't anytime soon, but whatever.