My Dearest Blizzard Entertainment: Fuck You.

[CommodoreKong]

Limiting your number of installs and conflicting with things like virtual drives is bad DRM.

And making the software depend on an external server is also bad DRM. I'm not trying to say that what EA's done is good (and I completely agree that install limits are bad), just that things like Steam are nearly as bad. Steam games will work offline under certain conditions... and won't work offline most of the time if you don't know in advance that you're going to be offline.

And to that end, I've never felt restricted by Steam in any way but the theoretical (except the last time I moved to a new apartment and couldn't play HL2 due to no connection) and I haven't felt restricted by the DRM in Mass Effect or Spore or Bioshock (which I installed through Steam but it still used Securom for some reason) either, beyond the theoretical.

To be fair Valve has said if they go under they'll make sure you'll be able to play your games without Steam, and I do believe that they mean that.

Like I've said I've never had any problems with Steam games offline, but then again I've only done it a few times.

One of the main thing that bothers me with the installation limits is that I often let my brother borrow my PC games and install them when I'm not playing them, and I think he sometimes installs them on both his desktop and his laptop, which would make me hit 3 installs.

Would having no DRM be better? Sure, it's always better, but like I said in my first post it just isn't feasible.

Depends what you mean by "feasible". Is it likely to happen? Perhaps not. Could it work? I have absolutely no doubt that it could.

I know a few retail games do ship with no DRM, and while I'm sure most developers would prefer their games ship with little to no DRM, but most publishers would never agree to that.

 

[Arrqh]

To be fair Valve has said if they go under they'll make sure you'll be able to play your games without Steam, and I do believe that they mean that.

Well sure... but pretty much everyone else who does DRM said the same thing. Not saying that they won't do that, but it seems silly to me for people to accept them at their word and not other companies and I've seen a lot of people do just that.