Hey man, already bought it awhile ago and since you're reading I think SPAZ, Bastion, and Sequence were the best games of 2011. Only one AAA game came close in polish and fun (Batman if you were wondering). Funny, I probably 1000 USD or more on games in 2011 and the most fun I had cost me 25 or so USD on some indie games. I hope you feel good about that because it's meant to make you feel good.

Thanks for the fun and I'll be buying a 2nd and non-Steam copy down the road. As for the free keys I hope some of the folks on here who haven't tried it get a chance to dive in and experience the horror for themselves;)

@orcishgamer

Thanks very much! This is really great to hear, and we are in some pretty awesome company on your list :)

If you have not tried it, the mod tools are beginning to take off and people are making their own ships and adding hangars. It is still early days, but it is exciting.

Well now I feel guilty! The key is appreciated, but I don’t think I could use it in good conscience (not because of the DRM, I just don’t feel I’ve done anything to deserve it).
I hope I haven’t caused you too much trouble.
Whether or not I use the key, I will buy the game the moment I hear the DRM has been removed. It would be hypocritical of me not to!

EDIT: Nice to see you already had an account here. ;D

I have not yet tried the mod tools, guess I'll have to take a break from my horror movie marathon and give them a shot;)

@SirPrimalform

Sent you an email too, but I just wanted to say that we are glad things are resolved. We really want people to enjoy their experience with SPAZ and MinMax in general. Please feel free to play it now. As I said in the mail, we have given many keys away over the last year for much more silly reasons than us screwing up, so please play.

If you haven't tried Dark Souls then you should. If you did and didn't care for it or it wasn't polished enough (framerate drops were pretty bad at times), then just ignore my suggestion.

Here is a link to the mods made in the last few days. There are some pretty nice ships :)
http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=32

That's true. Their DRM appears to be so light that it will probably not block me from buying the game at some point, if and when I get an urge to play it (right now I don't, it seems interesting but I am busy with other games ATM).

But as said, it still affects that I will not buy it beforehand into my backlog (just so that I don't forget to buy it; most probably I will not even remember the game one year from now, so in the end I will probably not buy it at all), and also what I am willing to pay for it (but as you said, the price is quite low already so this isn't really an issue to me).

Even if it is only a few bucks, I don't want to flush it down the toilet, ie. buying a game to the backlog, and later not being (conveniently) able to play it even once for reasons not in my control. It is certainly more about principle than necessity. I could easily afford to throw 5€ out of the window every morning, but I don't do that out of principle. I want to make sure I get at least something back for my money, no matter how little.

Are you making fun of my daily Starbucks "coffee" fix ;-P

That's a reason why I prefer buying (DRM-free) games from sites where I know for certain that none of their games have DRM. That means GOG and DotEmu, I guess. Impulse purchases and playing inspector Clouseau don't mix too well, like trying to figure out what the lack of any mention on "3rd party DRM" in certain sites' items really mean in practise (did they just forget to mention it, did it still have some in-house DRM, etc.), or for that matter what it means in practise that the DRM is said to be "SecuROM" or "Tages". One time activation on installation, installation caps, always online requirements? What?

That's why I normally couldn't care less for "GamersGate and Desure have DRM-free titles too!". Sure they do, and some Ubisoft games are DRM-free as well.

What, they don't sometimes give you your coffee? :-O

I don't think we have Starbucks in here, but I recall when I went to one abroad and also purchased their WiFi ticket in order to get some work done on my laptop, their WLAN was pretty much unusable. The data trickled down like 1kB/s and it lost the connection all the time, so in the end I couldn't even read my work email during the two hours I spent there.

Even though I didn't pay much for it, I felt ripped off. I certainly wouldn't have paid for the WiFi ticket if I had known, and I didn't go to that place again.

By the way, I think this was a good comment on the SPAZ forum discussion, and needs to be highlighted:

"Also, just a bit of education. When a corporation files for bankruptcy, all of its assets, including software and source code, cease to be the property of the company as they are sold and auctioned off to pay creditors. Thus, making a patch to remove DRM would be a derivative work and a violation of copyright as the software would no longer belong to the company that went bankrupt (which is not to say that creditors or other corporations that bought the auctioned material would care enough to file suit). Just some food-for-thought for the folks who think that when a company goes bankrupt it can spend the time to remove DRM. Sorry, it just isn't likely to happen."

I've also always felt calling BS to claims that "sure, if and when we go bankrupt, we'll just remove the DRM at that point, so nothing to worry". I think at that point removing DRM from their obsolete games is least of their worries or even on their mind at all, especially if the original developers have already fled elsewhere.

How many times have we heard the "sorry, but the source code got lost at some point" anyway?

But you still know what you're getting, no surprises. It could be different if sometimes you'd only get half a cup (for the same price), or no coffee at all.

The even sillier thing is that I wasn't even going to play SPAZ right away (I have a huge backlog) and the main reason I was going to buy it yesterday was 'putting my money where my mouth was' because I'd asked about the DRM. But thank you, I'll keep the key safe in my email account and give it a go when I finish a few of the games I'm in the middle of.

Sweetness. Nice move there. I already picked it up back at release but I'm sure this will make some people here happy :)

This just reinforces that I have no nor should I have any regrets when it comes to spending money on this game ^^