DivisionByZero.620: DRM in principle:
-No refunds or reselling
I don't think DRM prevents refunds in any way, even in principle. Quite the opposite in fact, because then the publisher can make sure the customer will not continue playing the game after the refund.
EA Origin has a better refund policy than e.g. Steam (at least for EA games), and it has nothing to do with DRM. GOG has too, but I think it is due to the lack of DRM that they e.g. expect you _not_ to download the game, if you want your money back (and there are no technical issues to be solved).
DivisionByZero.620: DRM in practice:
-Buy games on Steam at 80% discount or save money on bundles
I don't think DRM has anything to do with that, it is not the reason there are deep discounts and cheap bundles. Humble Bundle has peanut bundle sales too, also for DRM-free games. GOG also has deep discount bundles increasingly, no DRM needed for that.
The reasons for deep discounts and super cheap bundles are:
- Digital delivery (with or without DRM), which presses the costs down for publishers and developers.
- Highly increased competition in the (PC) gaming market, fueled by digital delivery. Much much more (indie) games on the market, which presses the prices down, affecting even AAA games (their prices seem to plummet faster and lower than on the retail times).
As for things ruining(?) gaming for me, apart from DRM:
1. Free-to-play model. This is mostly prevalent on mobile gaming, but somewhat also on PC gaming, mainly multiplayer online gaming.
For single-player games, f-2-p model seems to push the game mechanisms to one direction, narrowing what the games can be about. The game makers have to think "how can we push people to pay for the game through microtransactions, without making it too apparent?". Usually this is achieved by causing some kind of increasing level of annoyance to those who try to keep playing without paying, like making them wait, for hours or even for days, even for mundane tasks. So the question is "How can we annoy the player to pay us money?", not "How can we entertain the player?".
Also it seems to cause them to add luck-based "challenge" to certain types of games, so that even skillful players can't necessarily proceed with the game without losing every now and then. This is something I noticed with e.g. Plants vs Zombies 2, as compared to the first game. The importance of luck increased in the second game, you'd be doing good but then three bungee jumping enemies would suddenly ruin your game.
This in turn makes all those "superbombs" etc. more lucrative to buy with real money, because many times they are the only way to clear you out of those tight spots. Basically, you have to buy cheats in order to proceed with the game, or keep banging your head to the wall until either one cracks.
For online games, I take as an example TeamFortress 2. Earlier it was suggested that the pay items are merely useless fluff you don't really need, like funny hats. But if you don't pay, you have a quite limited inventory, which means you'll have to discard lots of items (weapons etc.) before you can really inspect and try them out. They really seem to have gone overboard with all those optional items, and the game has increasingly become a rock-paper-scissors type of game: do you own that special item that is an effective countermeasure against the item or ability the enemy has? And if you have such, then they will make a new item that nullifies your item. And so on, and so on. An arms race, who has the latest gadget that overcomes the earlier gadget?
Plus, you sometimes receive big boxes of items which you apparently can open only with real money.
Compare that to Team Fortress Classic, which has none of that bullshit. You instantly have access to all items and skills of your player class, you didn't have to "earn" or buy them. If someone made a new item or weapon mod for TFC, you'd have access to it if you played on that server.
2. Pushing online gaming elements also to single-player games. The publishers claim they do this to make the games more interesting for gamers (and maybe for some it does), but I believe the main reason is to use it as a form of DRM, and also push online microtransaction stuff to gamer while he plays (like Diablo 3 auction house where the publisher takes a cut from each transaction).
For a quite long time, I've preferred the Thief, Quake 3 and TeamFortress 2 approach, where a game concentrates only on being either a single-player, or multiplayer, experience. Why would Thief need a multiplayer mode, or TF2 a short single-player campaign? They don't, they are fine as being only single-player or online multiplayer games.
