Ok, so you get a game with an five activation limit.

Activations active are noted on a hidden SecurROM server out in the middle of Pignuts, Idaho.

Over a period of five years you have to format six times.

And you come to find out that SecuROM went out of business.

What happens then?

Well, you go to Pignuts, Idaho. When you go to the local bar, you find a friendly healer that's willing to accompany you. On your way out of town, your pockets are picked by a thief with a heart of gold, that after caught, pleads to help you on your quest. You rescue a noble but gruff fighter at a speed trap, and together you enter the SecuRom Headquarters. After fighting with their automated antivirus, which has driven the security turrets of the building insane, you eventually reach the One Disc to Rule Them All, which contains a master unlock code for all SecuRom systems. On the way out, you are betrayed by the fighter in your party, and must best him in hand to hand combat if anyone is ever to play a SecuRom'ed game again!

Cry yourself to sleep after realizing that game you bought with securom won't work on a DVD drive that runs 100 other games fine.

So no matter how much you try to avoid it, you're still going to be Googling for Serialz to crack your own legitimately and honestly purchased software. =/

Hopefully you have the "get one activation per three months" plan. At least that's how they market it these days.

There are many games I wanted to buy, but didn't because of SecuROM. I'm not putting down my hard-earned money for a game that I can only install 5 times. The deauthorize tool is BS, and an unacceptable compromise.

One of these days, the companies that run the activation servers are going to go out of business. Guess who will have the only working copies of the games? That's right, the pirates.

Hopefully GoG will still be around to buy the stuff back from the Pirates and resell it again. *grins*

By Innos, that's brilliant! The pirates will rule all! All hail our future pirate / privateer overlords!

You rebuy it on Steam or GOG, like you should have in the first place.If that happens and it can't be rebought through other avenues you'd be cleared to crack it yourself and the tools would be well established to do so. The legal precedence on such things points to the IP holder not being able take you out, even if they contested for some reason.

The likelihood of that is small. The current trend is more and more towards legal online archival repositories and IP holders deciding to put it back up for sale or just let it go like with Amiga related IP.

Always check the label . . . =)

Actually, that wouldn't help if they were to go out of business. No matter how many activations you should have, you don't have any if there's no server.

Certainly that's part of the reason why I don't buy Securom games at all anymore, except for a simple disk check. F3 and Batamn: AA were two such recent PC games and on retail, with GFWL, (in offline mode), are virtually DRM free.

In the past, I've been burnt by Securom three times. The first resulted in a non functioning dvd drive, the second resulted in a extremely slow computer that needed reformatting, the third resulted in a broken OS that was fixed with windows repair. I had to fix three other computers that too were affected by securom. I hate the thing and rally as much as I can against, at times.

Both F3 and Batman: AA interestingly enough did not mess up my system. I think it's the version used that is the cause. I did experiment with this and installed it on one of the computers that got messed up due to the DRM. Like mine the computer did not run into any big problems or slowdowns.

Since I've stopped buying Securom games, my computer has been fine. Except for the reformat for maintenance every 6 months my computer is in good shape. Of course I very well could be in a minority, but I have no reason to waste my time with games that use it or other types of equally horrible DRM. I stick with buying games with steamworks and it has worked just fine for me. I can and have resisted games that use other forms of DRM.

Steam's no more magically secure than SecuROM, it's still dependant on an activation server. As for GOG, the game probably wouldn't have been on GOG at the time they originally bought it.

Mine says "Wash in a Newell free environment - do not steam".

Ups. Guilty as charged.

lol . . . DO NOT STEAM . . . I like it . . . =)