jamyskis: Wonderful article, and all certainly very true, but allow me to play Devil's Advocate for a moment and present you with some (obviously problematic) arguments that DRM apologists are likely to throw at you.
"If there's a nuclear war, then you won't not only have no phones or no internet, but also no power."
"In the unlikely event there's a nuclear war, the last thing on your mind will be playing games."
...
Aside from Nirth's comment in this very thread, which was easy to address, I actually haven't found that to be a problem. I guess I'm just lucky with who I've run into.
I generally don't like to argue so, If I did run into people who fought that hard, I'd probably just shut down the argument by standing firm on the point that, just as I have no right to DRM-free games, they have no right to my money and I've chosen to spend it elsewhere.
Nirth: I know this isn't a solution but it's a pity we need a professional lawyer to read a paper everyone signs up daily if they play new games or sign up in places and such. I think a good come back here is that a group highly technically skilled programmers and some law people could create an analsysis tool that would swallow up regular EULAs and then spit out what they mean in laymans terms, perhaps more would be indicated to read especially if the specific area they talk about would be catagorized by their relevance of control from the company they give up rights too (like red warning when they take the right to suspend your account at their discretion without a reason).
Reliable, general analysis of written English is the same kind of difficult as computer vision. Computer vision is hard enough that we have CAPTCHAs. The ideal solution would be to make the license out of modular blocks.
Each block would be a chunk of legalese and an approved summary. The authoritative coup of the license itself would be a list of blocks that could be rendered as either the summary or the legalese.
...of course, that would turn the system on its head, so it's not going to happen.
ssokolow: 4. It's a pain in the ass to make sure you have the right crack, to make sure find and apply a new one after patching, to keep backups of your cracks, etc. (I still remember the days when everyone cracked, even if just to avoid annoying disc-swapping.)
Nirth: True but in this case I was thinking that you could make an exception for games you really want so the amount of games needed to keep track off is minimal.
Except that a "no exceptions" policy on DRM is how I get my "holier than thou" fix in a harmless way while ignoring the EULA is like ignoring that guy on the street corner who's swearing at passing cars as you drive by. (He has a right to free speech in public places, but what he does with it causes everyone to ignore him.)
If I make exceptions, I lose the moral high ground and I value that more than the enjoyment of playing some random game.
ssokolow: Terraria vs Minecraft
Nirth: I see the problem now but as long as you have a choice to play, it shouldn't matter too much right?
That's the problem. You don't have a choice. Defeating one of the bosses permanently enables Hard Mode (which, among other things, makes corruption spread beyond the sunflowers) and you need to defeat that boss to get access to higher-level items and progress further in the game.