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I bought Crysis Warhead on Steam, without really reading anything specific about it there, thinking that there wouldn't be any DRM on it, besides Steam. I was wrong. With a 5 limit activation I was pissed off. Only recently have they released a revoke tool for it, which is the only EA released game with one, as far as I know. However I've not bought any EA games since, and I probably won't either.
I also bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky. I hadn't done any research on it's DRM, since there weren't anything special on Shadow of Chernobyl that bothered me, but I should have understood when I saw the "Deepsilver" logo on it. I got so pissed, that I just downloaded a crack instead of activating it.
I hate EA, I hate Sony, I hate Deepsilver and I hate Tagès SA. They should all go into a dark pit, and die in a puddle of bile, vomit, shit and maggots.
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Petrell: And I don't buy a license/rent the digital products I buy. I buy a product like any other physical item I can buy and do what ever I want with it (besides distribtuing copies of it). I'll wipe my ass with their license and eulas as they are not explained to me with my laywyer present at time of the purchase and I sign no contract. At time of purchase the seller forfeits all right except selling/distribution of copies to me. Period.
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fuNGoo: That's right, you can do whatever you want with it. That's also why the sellers can do whatever they want with their product when sell it.

Exept restrict my ability to use the product the way I want to use it after purchase(so DRM is outright illegal in my book and should be in reality as well). Also wasn't the DRM sony hid in their music CD's reason for class action suit forcing sony to pull the CD's off the market, release a patch to disable the DRM (quite few actually before it got fully removed from systems) and pay back the money to who wanted to return the peace of grap they sold. (or something along the lines) I've long time wondered why same never happened with computer software.
As for circumventing the restrictions, they are not always available nor always work as well you'd hope. Plus doing that is illegal according to most countries laws so doing so makes me, the legal owner of the product, criminal in eyes of the law (lobbyists and makers of these laws should have been burned by stake). Not that that stops me from using the medhods but still...
Hahaha... oh man.
Debates never really change anyone's minds, because everyone's already so deeply entrenched in their viewpoint.
The way I see it from the publisher's side, most activation limits in recent times have been put in place mainly to deter the majority of "mainstream" or "casual" consumers from performing multiple installations at launch time. Soon after, activation limits are patched out after initial sales are achieved. People may think that public outcry instigated the removals of activation limits, but I think they were going to do so anyway.
It's probably not the best way to handle the situation, but no one has yet responded to my request of offering a better solution than what exists right now.
EDIT: Missed one minor 'not' in my last sentence.
Post edited February 17, 2009 by fuNGoo
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fuNGoo: The way I see it from the publisher's side, most activation limits in recent times have been put in place mainly to deter the majority of "mainstream" or "casual" consumers from performing multiple installations at launch time.

Why is this something that should be forbidden?
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fuNGoo: It's probably not the best way to handle the situation, but no one has yet responded to my request of offering a better solution than what exists right now.

If you give people a reason to buy, they'll buy. DRM has the exact opposite effect. It makes a product less useful, and therefore less valuable. Instead, concentrate on providing value that can't be copied. There will be people who freeload, sure. You'll get that no matter what. DRM hasn't stopped it, and never will. You can either ignore them, or take advantage of them. Free advertising. The more people hear about you, the more likely you are to reach someone who's willing to pay for those uncopyables.
(GOG hits 4 or 5 of the 8 items in the article, although "Patronage" is a bit of a freebie. You really have to piss off your customers to lose that one)
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fuNGoo: Is there anyone as fucking awesome as I am who has NEVER been burned by DRM?
Steam, StarForce, Games For Windows Live, Direct2Drive... I'm just impervious.
Although I did once buy a box copy of Painkiller: Black Edition that came with no CD key inside. I emailed the company with photos of my receipts, box, and discs but they never responded. So I resorted to a serial keygen but was deprived of online multiplayer.
What do you DRM haters have to say to that?

I say "Cool. More power to you."
But if, at some future date, you're bitten hard by DRM, I think maybe you'll change your point of view. Since it's never bothered you, I understand why you couldn't give a crap about it. Many people have had the same point of view. Until they're bitten by it. I was one of them. Never really gave a crap about copy protection or DRM until I was bitten by it.
But you know what? It only took once for me. I don't feel like going through the crap I went through with BioShock with any other game or software purchase. I have better things to do with my time and I'm too old to put up with shit like this. I pay for my software. All of it. I don't steal it. There's no god damned excuse in the world why I should be locked out of it.
I got on the anti-DRM bandwagon fairly early so I haven't run into many problems (I tend to just avoid potentially problematic games). The only case that I can remember where I got slightly burned was with a copy of HOMM5; on installing it on my new computer it refused to recognize that the disk was in the drive (I'm guessing that Securom didn't like that I had Daemon Tools installed). That minor issue was fixed in about 2 minutes with a NoCD crack. I actually consider the entire incident quite humorous and ironic.
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fuNGoo: That's right, you can do whatever you want with it. That's also why the sellers can do whatever they want with their product when sell it.

Indeed- sellers can do whatever they want with their products right up to the point where they sell those products, at which point their product now belongs to whoever bought it and the sellers have absolutely no claim to it anymore. They are also free to include contract terms as part of the sale, provided that those terms are disclosed and explicitly agreed to prior to the sale. If a product has been sold and no contract terms were attached at the time of sale then the seller has absolutely no claim of control over how the product is used by the buyer.
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fuNGoo: The way I see it from the publisher's side, most activation limits in recent times have been put in place mainly to deter the majority of "mainstream" or "casual" consumers from performing multiple installations at launch time. Soon after, activation limits are patched out after initial sales are achieved.

Activation limits are there to kill the second-hand market. Publishers don't want people reselling games after realizing the game is shit, as this would flood the second-hand market quite quickly and drive down sales of new copies.
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fuNGoo: It's probably not the best way to handle the situation, but no one has yet responded to my request of offering a better solution than what exists right now.

No DRM. It's that fucking simple. It's completely ineffective at stopping piracy, only hurts legitimate customers, and the real reason behind it is only to throw up a technical barrier to the rights people have under copyright law.
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DarrkPhoenix: Activation limits are there to kill the second-hand market. Publishers don't want people reselling games after realizing the game is shit, as this would flood the second-hand market quite quickly and drive down sales of new copies.

But first people have to buy new copies.... then resell them. Unless it's that mega-bad (Daikanata?), there's always a resale cottage industry.
A lot of people buy games, finish them (or not), and then sell them soon after. Others then buy these discounted copies, finish them (or not), and sell them on again. For a game that was very popular but has little replay value a single copy could theoretically have multiple owners, and that adds up to a quite sizeable percentage of sales that the publisher doesn't get anything from. This is partly why publishers like Steam and other services; you can buy it, but you can't ever sell it.
Publishers always blame activation limits on piracy, but in fact this is partly just a scapegoat to distract buyers from realising the "first sale" right is being taken away. Any form of DRM they can come up with will only stop so-called "casual piracy" (e.g. friends sharing a single disc and playing simultaneously); for the true pirates, a working game is just a crack away. Games are almost always leaked days before the release date, typically including a fully functional crack, so in many cases the pirates are playing before anyone else. Not only that, any problems buyers have with the latest flavour of copy protection do not affect them.
These early releases encourage many buyers to download the cracked version to play until the real thing arrives, which may well lead a percentage of them to skip the extra step and not buy the next game altogether. This is as well as a percentage of players who download a game in order to see what it's like (since most new games have no demos) and end up not buying it because they don't like it or it turns out to be the sort of thing you'd rent rather than own.
Post edited February 18, 2009 by Arkose
Never had a problem with DRM. (touch wood).
But it has prevented me buying a few games i'd have otherwise bought (Chaos League, etc..)
I'm personally of the opinion that if the DRM is invisible and doesn't prevent me doing reasonable things then its ok.
For example, it the mass effect DRM had worked as they originally stated then I would have been fine with it. But it didn't, and that cause problems for some.
I think 95% of the problems are overblown, but i think the publishers are killing themselves with their stupid decisions. They've managed to make DRM so hated that if they introduced a totally fair set of DRM now it'd still get attacked.
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soulgrindr: Never had a problem with DRM. (touch wood).
But it has prevented me buying a few games i'd have otherwise bought (Chaos League, etc..)
I'm personally of the opinion that if the DRM is invisible and doesn't prevent me doing reasonable things then its ok.
For example, it the mass effect DRM had worked as they originally stated then I would have been fine with it. But it didn't, and that cause problems for some.
I think 95% of the problems are overblown, but i think the publishers are killing themselves with their stupid decisions. They've managed to make DRM so hated that if they introduced a totally fair set of DRM now it'd still get attacked.

I wouldn't want DRM to be invisible. Because that would fall under spyware. If it just sits there, but it says on the box that it's got DRM that does this, this, or this, then I'll buy it.
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soulgrindr: They've managed to make DRM so hated that if they introduced a totally fair set of DRM now it'd still get attacked.

It's not possible to create DRM that's totally fair.
It is a faulty product and a bad business decision if a company wants to include it.
First of all, the supposed reason of DRM is to prevent people easily copying games and therefore loosing revenues.
As far as I can tell no game exists on this planet or will ever exist (which isn't heavily based on online experience) where people have failed to circumvent the copy protection.
So what you're left with is a product sold with a third party product alongside it, which not only cost extra money now, but also cost extra money in terms of development and testing (not only of the product itself but also of future patches) and cost extra money in terms of support.
Not to mention the lawsuits now being prepared by Alan Himmelfarb and others (more info here ) which in turn creates even a certain risk if you include this.
A non DRM version of any product is always superior to a DRM'd product and a non DRM version will always make more profit than a DRM'd version (it cost less to make and loss of revenues due to copying will always occur in equal amount for both versions)
DRM in general is faulty software, as it doesn't add anything positive to the consumer's experience with the game. I honestly don't want 3rd-party software to take away the freedom to use my computer as I wish without a good reason or compensation. There isn't even a warning that such a piece of cursed malware is being installed on my HD. I flipped out when I was doing a cleanup in my notebook's HD and found a Securom folder. How the hell did it get there? Don't know to this date, and I formatted it anyways after a while.
The only one who seems to get away from that is Valve's Steam, which manages to fuse copy protection (though it can be bypassed, but apparently not in a grand scale) and draw a community together with a single application. Now this is something more effective.
A site I visit irregular but has nice items and info about this stuff:
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
DRM is a clever system to weed out the moaning little whiny children from the rest of the universe. Best damned invention ever.
Don't forget the chicken and the egg, the thief could not have possibly come first. Stop stealing stuff and people would stop trying to stop you from stealing it !
You don't happen to work for SonyDADC do you?