With streaming I don't think one can play cr*cked versions, as the files are kept server side.

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Some of them were quite fun, and were often designed to look nice as collectibles.

If part of the multiplayer is only online I can live with that as long the single player is ok and there is an option to play on lan

I'm fine with DRM as long as the game plays fine and there's only a very small chance of the DRM interrupting my gameplay.

I'm not particularly concerned with preservation. I noticed that when I was buying old games but really never felt like going back to them, and there's so many new games coming out that are generally improved versions (sometimes even of those very same games) I'll have too much to play to worry to be too concerned with it if a game does happen to become unavailable at some point.

Honestly, the way things are headed I think DRM *and* NO-DRM is going to become obsolete in about 20 years or so anyway because a lot of gaming will eventually be done through streaming.

Exactly. Back in the '80s and '90s games scame with interesting paperwork which was both collectible and informative as part of the lore. Some came with fancy or original stuff like fake newspaper pages or other themed stuff.
I honestly miss them.

That meant you had either a missing or extra quote or slash-quote somewhere. You have to count them carefully. Happens more likely if you include older quotes within quotes, then you must remember to have two slash-quotes afterwards.

And from your reply, I see you mastered the art of quoting after all. :)

"..for one that knows what they are doing" is an example of the "No true Scotsman"-argumentation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I know what I am doing, and no it is not as easy and simple as you suggest. Not even for a true Scotsman. Believe me, I have been doing it for years, hunting down working cracks for the hundreds of older CD/DVD games that I have. It is a complete pain in the ass to do.

"Credits for the original copy protection and manual check crack go to Mr BigDick from the famous 1990s cracking scene group 'The Humungous Assholes'".

Yeah, I guess that would work...

I had no quotes within quotes and it still borked up....oh well, it's working now.

I don't doubt you do, but I still say it isn't THAT tough for a FEW games, and once you have working cr*cks saved you don't need to hunt them down if you back them up unless the game needs a new one for some reason.


You know what I meant.....a simple "this is a result of a 'community fix'" PR-spun style comment would be all it would take to be nice to those that did the work. :)

Unfortunately the trend now is to sell what were once “goodies” as separate DLC, so you would effectively be charged more to use your product with that setup - yes there is at least one game here which sells manual separately.

I personally hated those kind of DRM the most.

First of all they were inconvenient, trying to find the manual or code wheel before you could play the game, and read it.

And it that code wheel broke down from too much use or my proverbial dog ate the manual (ok I don't have the dog, I ate the manual myself), then no game for me anymore, even if I still had the original CD or the floppy disk.

Or make a chart of what symbols/etc mean what to input into the game and using that.

As I said, make a chart or a backup of sorts....problem sol-ved.

DRM would become obsolete only if all, or almost all, gaming would go streaming.

When talking about streaming gaming, I don't understand that kind of black and white thinking at all. Some think that pretty much all (or at least all "AAA") gaming in the future will be only through streaming services, while some think streaming will utterly fail and not be a thing at all.

I am more in the middle. I think there will be maybe even some relatively successful streaming game services around in the future... but they will not kill the "local gaming". The two will simply co-exist.

Why wouldn't they coexist? Why would a game publisher think "I will NOT publish my games on Steam anymore, but only on Google Stadia!". Why? As long as there are lots of gamers outside of streaming service, it would be kinda silly not to sell the game also to them, irrespective whether you decide to sell the game also on some streaming services.

Maybe the logic goes that in the future 99% of gamers want to play only through streaming services and not on their gaming consoles or PCs... but I don't see that happening either unless almost all games had moved to streaming only.

The hen and egg problem. Most publishers would not go streaming only unless that's where most of their market would be... and users won't go streaming only unless that is where most of their games would be. One has to happen before the other one.

And no, Netflix does not prove anything as Netflix etc. is mostly a replacement for renting movies from video stores, or subscribing to a movie cable TV, not buying movies for yourself as DVDs. The people who ever bought movies was always a small niche market compared to rentals or movie cable TV subscriptions.

(Also, it actually seems to be possible to copy streamed movies and TV series to yourself pretty easily... so in case you encounter a movie you want to "own" in a streaming service, it might be only a few clicks away, even if you are not really allowed to do it, without the risk of being caught like would happen if you downloaded the movie from a pirate site.)

More often than not, making such a chart would be near impossible, which was kinda the point. Like with the aforementioned code wheels (are you actually going through all the different positions of the wheels, and writing each of them down one by one from the hundreds if not thousands of different combinations?), or from the past I recall some games where you had e.g. silhouettes of different ships that you had to look up in the manual. Good luck writing those silhouettes down.

You know...sometimes I think you've got a bit of the cognitive dissonance/finding problems in things thing going on there. ;)

Making such a chart would be easy for most....many such charts often had around 30-50 symbol/word pairs at most.....not that hard to copy down if one needed to.

As for symbols, one could scan them with a scanner/etc.

But, but, buttt you are a huge fan of Hitman 2 which is always online... Teasing you, i also bite for that game even though regular saves corruptions, poorer story presentation and me not fan of a few bloated huuuge maps had reason of my interest in the second game so far. Still quite the crazy amount of content for an "always online service" on this one, have to prop that!

On topic, i can tolerate "unintrusive" DRM's (periodic launcher(s) checks) the only DRM i don't, can't accept are the really performance hitting ones and the limited activations per serial key. (StarForce?)

If it's multiplayer-only or I only care about the MP, then I don't care about DRM, unless it impacts the performance of the game or just makes things more incovenient. I already accept that multiplayer games have a very finite lifespan and are worthless afterwards. For a single-player game... no way. DRM-free or no buy.

Only "drm" I would accept is Monkey Island's Dial-A-Pirate codewheel.
If publishers can afford to pay hundred of thousands of dollars for third party drm, they can afford to mail me my codewheel.

Someone should get on making parody code wheels listing all the bad DRM/aspects of current devs......it would be fun for a bit, at least.