Well, yes, I appreciate that profit factors into the equation. Hence why I used the word "can" rather than "do" in my post, and why I clarified it was economically fair rather than talking about the moral side of things. But ultimately it's still "fairer" to offer games cheaper to nations with lower incomes, even when you accept that it's for reasons of profit. You could even argue that "fairness" even includes the profitable factor, as companies are, after all, entitled to make money off the products they create.

Absolutely none of those have anything to do with DRM, looks like you are mixing up digital distribution with DRM.

amok, I am not really sure I understand what you mean with the above points. Could you please elaborate, including explain how they are benefits to the gamer?

Edit:

Gersen, that is exactly what I am expecting to be the case.

That's true. And if a company is willing to pay for bandwidth for roughly 30% of people who paid for a game and 70% of people who didn't on top of that, sure, it's possible to be DRM-free there. But even tho I do very much prefer DRM-free, if I were to give the services amok has described, I would definitely go for a DRMed solution. Because gamers are mostly entitled bastards and by stating "People who pirated the game, please, don't use my patching and cloud servers!" I definitely won't stop them. And, in turn, I'm going to blow most of the money made from regular customers on pirates using my online services. So yeah, it can work. It's not a good idea.

So?

Does that make the system worse? I have news for you: Everybody in this business is in it for the money. GOG, Valve, EA, you name it. But to make most money, they need to have prices that lower income regions can pay.

The fairness might be accidental, but who cares ...

Which is why in practice I have no problem with games using Steamworks in the absence of 3rd party DRM. But I would never prefer that to the same game using a sort of Steamworks Light, with all the non-DRM features of Steamworks but without the DRM. I will also say the first thing I do when I get a Steam key from a HIB is to activate, I would never dream of gifting it away. Edit: Much less SELL it!

That is also why piracy, while nothing bad in itself, must always be a lesser service than a bought game. Because their needs to be a benefit in actually paying. Both GOG and Valve have copied the benefits piracy offers and brought it to the consumer. The insanity of copy protection schemes starting in the late '90s actually made pirated version the superior one.

The single click installing was done by pirates years before companies came up with that.

Thankfully that is over now. People in Russia haven't switched to Steam because they needed to, but because they wanted to.

What are you talking about ? We are talking about DRM vs DRM-free, not about offline vs online services, if peoples wants to use optional (optional being the keyword here) online service, like multiplayer, cloud saving, etc... it's fine that they have to connect to use, it doesn't qualify as DRM.

As far as I know GoG doesn't let peoples who don't pay from the games download them from their server, and yet the games are DRM-free and If someday GoG offer an optional cloud save service and that to use this service you have to enter your credentials and that this service only works for games you actually bought, it wouldn't make said games any less DRM-free.

This is absolutely true. Tons of patched pirate copies of MS Windows agree.

Oh, and it's not a problem to make a cloud saving mechanism yourself for games that don't support it. It's just the matter of syncing your save folder with dropbox/box.com/gdrive/you name it, and writing launcher script to do it for you each time you start/exit the game. I might write one of these myself, but I'm not too bothered with it as I only have 1 computer. Even without script, you can use default client of those free cloud storages to do it for you automatically, every hour/day/*time interval*

This makes you a snowflake in the Sahara.

Edit:

THOUSAND POSTS!!!!!

My work here is done!

And the thing preventing guy with pirated copy of GOG game to use their cloud saving service is....? Oh wait...

The password protection on it?

1 - Secure content delivery - the gamer gets a security inbuilt into the software. DRM can also manages the security of the software on the user side as well as producers side
2 - Secure inter-platform mobility - easier to keep tabs on what software you own and what you can and can not keep between platforms (by easier I mean for the computer and software, not your memory) leading to
3 - Transfer flexibility - which is difficult without #2. also a variasion of #7. Flexibility to transfer software and parts of software between devices and platforms.
4 - Content security - variations of #1, but more about maintaining security and integrity of your software after delivery. not really that important for gamers, but bad if you are doing MMO's and want to cheat... good if you do not want cheaters and bots...
5 - Tracking flexibility and operationalization - you can not track your software and usage without any form of DRM, why would you though? good question, mostly for your own curiosity
7 - Software version and content syncing - most important for gamers? makes syncing and keeping your games up to date easier.

and still, yes you can do all of them without DRM, but DRM makes it easier.

is DRM.