i would love to say that people woul've learned their lesson and that game buyers would be more aware about DRM ant that publishers would stop placing it on their games. Unfortunatly I don't believe that, the average pc gmae buyer doesn't have enough knowledge/or does not give a damn about DRM (same are even like junkies, they just want to play) and the publishers won't stop DRM'ing their games because they are still truly convinced that piracy is to blame about their poor sales, besides with DRM (and it was now proen) they can even dictate the lifespan of a game, and if they want they can star to implement a renting fee for you to play.
This problem just shows what many people suspected, and the worse fears of others. You really don't buy/own a DRM'ed games, you lease/rent it for an undetermined time, at best.

Depends how you look at it. GoW was released long before Bioshock, albeit not on PC. The "new engine hype" was mostly for GoW, since it was the first game released with the Unreal3 engine. But you're right, on the PC, Bioshock was released before GoW.

Two things. First, DRM doesn't prevent people from downloading and playing pirated games. It never has, and it never will, at least as long as it's on an open platform (the security model of DRM is fundamentally flawed). Second, the focus of a company should be to make money, which means increasing sales. This is by no means synonymous with reducing piracy; in fact in many cases the efforts to reduce piracy actually reduce sales.

Ah, I forgot about the 360 altogether...

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen such a blatant example of Godwin's law in action. Usually it is a much more subtle, creeping event.
If they actually made good games and sold them at a decent, reasonable price, it would do much more for preventing piracy than any draconian DRM scheme ever could. Hopefully this event will hurt Epic and MS's business and force them to re-think this whole idea of DRM. Then again, we are talking about MS here; they practically invented the concept of the draconian DRM scheme with Windows activations and "Genuine Advantage" checks.

Well, it's only natural. After all, I was talking about the PC version of GoW.

I'm pretty sure that the recent plague of more and more invasive DRM schemes have done more to promote piracy than anything else.

Considering Spore has become the most pirated game in gaming history, you're probably right :P

I don't know about that. Neither does anyone else, I think. Whatever "statistics" the publishers cook up, usually don't have any reliable sources or proper explanations about how they arrived at those figures. Besides, Spore was kind of a special case. The hype had been ridiculous, and the extremely dubious decision by EA to release it in Europe two days before the US release, would have contributed greatly to the amount of pirated versions in the US. Besides, one download of a pirated version does not equal one lost sale. Some might not have bought it anyway, and some who would, still do. Of course, with the extremely disappointing and shallow gaming experience it turned out to be, many of those who had intended to buy it once it became available, probably didn't. I certainly regretted shelling out all that money for the Galactic Edition.
But yes, the DRM issue probably made it even worse. All in all, the entire decision making process surrounding Spore seems designed to ensure it would be the most pirated game in history.

in my personal opinion, better technology, usually is worse for customers.
take into account viacom getting all the ip addresses of people who watched a copyrighted video on youtube..
the reason they were able to get those, was because google had logged all that information.
wikipedia doesn't log information, if a suit like that were to somehow happen to wikipedia, and they asked for ip logs they'd be all "lol, we don't keep logs, it costs to much to archive the data that is virtually useless"
from what I understand, GOG uses a sort of lower technology level than steam for selling games, which means that they can without a doubt make the games available for purchase world wide at the same time as everyone else (timezones, mind you), so technology advances aren't always great.

Wikipedia does log information it is just that the IP's of those who have visited are useless to most people.
GOG can release games simultaneously because there is only one site, GOG.com, and the games released have been on release for the past fifty thousand years. No point in limiting the second coming to one continent or another with aged games is there?

well at the same time, I believe it is done because they do not have a more advanced method of doing it either, because it would be pointless to do it in a more advanced method.
IMO lower-level tech usually helps the customer.
I.E. a netbook with XP as opposed to a Quadcore heavy machine monster nightmare kind of computer, for simple web browsing and email sending. in otherwords, Keep it Simple, Stupid.

Aside from the notion that DRM'd games might actually promote piracy. There's another thing which I find difficult to understand.
Why do most publishers target their games at 13 year olds (or encourage the developers to do so)?
When I was 13 I bought at the most 2 games a year I pirated the rest because I either didn't have the money, or was more likely to spend my money at other stuff.
Now I'm in a position where I don't have to manage my funds to a larger extent, so I buy loads of games every year ( and loads of music and films as well).
That being said, I don't understand why a publisher wouldn't make solely R-rated games, because there is where the money is at.
The ESA reported in 2006 that the average gamer (US) is 33 years old (I don't have the current statistics)

Exactly Zhirek, I also don't understand why most of the games are dumbed down for 13 years old people(at least mentally).
It seems to me like that most of the bigger firms in the gaming industry got nearly no idea about gaming or they just simply listen marketing department instead of developers. Nevertheless this is something good, in free market environment we should see some new firms with an older target audience.

I thought stores like Wal-Mart will not stock R18, so when going for the large US demographic, you cut down the game a bit to increase it's chance of it having a life on a shelf.
The "games are for kids" attitude is still prevalent to joe public too.
As for Australia? No R18 at all!
We have Michael Atkinson (I apologise on behalf of South Australia) to protect the kiddies for us in case some older child (anyone under 30) brings home a title that a little one may grab. Apparently, this does not happen for print-media and film. (end rant)

The thing is, despite the fact that WalMart is the largest retailer in the US, it is not the only place you can go to get games. Its not even the place with the best selection. There are literally hundreds of other outlets games are sold in, yet the game publishers have allowed just one of those to dictate what can and cannot be sold everywhere in the US, instead of allowing the customers to dictate that, which is how it should be. This is why I hope the digital distribution model becomes the standard; the corrupt retailers that push their misguided morals on the public are removed from the picture and gaming can finally have the stigma of "games are just for kids" removed from it.
I'm not sure if that will help our Aussie friends at all, though.