I'm thinking of driving to Germany and kicking some major groin areas of the people who made this decision. Have they no shame?

Although, a bit hypocritical, I own a fuck-ton of steam games. But usually only if I can also get a retail copy, so I can no-crack the shit out of that and still have a semi-clean conscience.

Thanks guys!!!

I may just go and give Bioshock 2 a go then.

My personal worst experience with DRM was when I bought the Galactic Edition of Spore on release day, and found out that EA had forgotten to add the CD keys from the Galactic Edition to the activation servers.

Then there was the time when Steam refused to log me on for 3 days straight. There was nothing wrong with my net connection, Steam just wouldn't log me on, and thus wouldn't start at all. No error message, no timeout, it just stood there "logging on" for up to 30 minutes before I killed it.

Beyond Good and Evil's installer realises the 32-bit driver can't be installed on a 64-bit system, and promptly removes everything it's just installed.

GTA IV is a mess. Any game that has install limits or machine limits are bullshit too.

Only one I've had in the past year is Steam refusing to start in Offline mode, when my internet connection goes down, so I've been blocked from playing any of my Steam games for a day or so.

No, and by golly, they seem indeed to be bent on this hideous path.

I suppose that is one more franchise going down the drain for me... :((( THx for pointing out, so that I can cancel my preorder and drop amiable feedback to the developers.

My DVD burner got ruined late last year. My computer could still see it but thought it was a CD drive, and couldn't read anything that I put in it.

I narrowed the cause down to a Total War game's DRM. I couldn't get the DVD drive to work again, even after uninstalling, and had to replace it. Most irritating & useless weekend ever.

I don't think I've bought a PC game since that had DRM. Long live GOG!

Probably not being able to (easily) get a generous gift onto my Kindle.. Calibre won't convert it because it has DRM.

http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ really helped me with that kind of thing. It's a blog where you will find Calibre plugins & other tools that remove DRM and instructions. Hurrary for open-source development!

Yeah, I know about that. The key word being "easily".. it is 1am after all :)

Thanks.

Wow, that's not the impression I when i installed BioShock 2 yesterday. I tried to play it offline, and when I tried to save, it said "You cannot save the game because you are not logged in" or something like that. If there is indeed (still) a way to play BS2 without being logged in, I'd love to set that up before I get any further!

Can anyone give us the steps needed to play it offline AND be able to save? Thanks!

I'd say, either:
-Download and install crack
-Wait for it to be sold on gog

I haven't had any bad experiences except with skyrim - I didn't know it came with steam. When I started installing, it installed steam, so I was.....ok. Then it said "You cannot install the game because it has not been released yet". What? What's this physical disc I have here then? Apparently it wasn't "released" in the US yet (because of time differences) and I have to WAIT till its "released" in the US (which is basically the next day, my time) before I can install. Annoyed the heck out of me.

A long time ago, I installed Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown and was horrified to see that it had installed Starforce. I guess that was my bad for not checking about DRM first. I always do now and base buying decisions on what I find out.

Anyway, fortunately I had a current backup of all my data on a USB drive so I did a clean install of Windows XP completely blowing away the Starforce infected install that I had, restored my data and a day later was back to where I started from.

I threw away the game and went to Gamespot to write a negative review pointing out that it had Starforce to warn others.

True story.

I hope publishers learn something good from what is happening on GoG. I gladly buy DRM-free games here that do not punish me, the paying gamer with malware, install limits, etc. Most people are pretty decent if you just give them a chance. Publishers would do well to realize that and treat their customers well not poorly, like thieves. I believe it is a minority that steal, not a majority. Look at the success of Skyrim? Surely that was cracked in short order yet look at how many gladly purchased the game. There's proof right there.