We and presumably a few others did it! We "re-whitened" the anjohl's unpopular opinion. ;-)

It's back down. :(

As I said, they do it to prevent used game sales(for the most part).....loss prevention plays a part, but it is much less a reason for implementing DRM then preventing used game sales(and a few other reasons).

As for losing customers/not making money: They know many will buy the games because those people want to play them, and that such people either don't mind the DRM or they'll "Bite the bullet" and take a hit to their morals to be able to play said games. They also know some will buy the games and crack the DRM out later.

Either way, they get paid for their games(Well, usually......sometimes a game will bomb because it's crap, etc.).
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But it IS (relatively)easy to copy and distribute copies of said games....most of the people who don't pirate are those: Morally against it, those afraid of getting viruses from torrents, older people/others that aren't very PC literate, etc.

Jefequeso, I am not lookimg for sympathy, just a little bit of consistancy.

There's a reason why people pay for insurances, use safety belts, lock their doors when they go out etc. They don't know for sure, but they want to be prepared.

The examples of stripping out DRM have been for recent, singular games due to customer feedback, when the company has still been fully functional and afraid how the bad press will affect the sales of their future games. Not cases where a company who has just gone belly-up is supposed to remove DRM from all hundreds or thousands of their games, some of which might be even decades old and cared only by a couple of freaks who'd still like to play old games. I mean come on, who cares about old games?

Here's a pretty good old rebuttal to the "no problem, then they'll just remove the DRM"-argument (I came to this a couple of days ago when I was googling info for the Bioshock 2 DRM):

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1680

Read it from start to finish.

On top of that, no there is no "kill switch" in the DRM systems which the makers just need to flip in order to make all games using that DRM free of it. First the technical problem: if there was such a switch, then the pirates would certainly have found and exploited it already, making e.g. all Steam or Origin games DRM-free at will. Such a "universal DRM kill switch" would be simply a very poor and insecure DRM implementation in an open system like PCs. It might work better on closed systems like gaming consoles or IPhones.

The the legal problem: even if there was, the company would first have to get a permission from the IP holders of all the games in the service that it is ok to them too that the DRM is switched off from their games. After all, they might be still selling some of those games on some other services.

Man, there are plenty of great sites out there with millions of virus-free no-cd cracks. If i ever need one of these, they will be there. As i said, i dont feel bad about using no-cd patches on games i own, and it isnt even illegal.

Again, what you said is merely hypothetical. We will never know for sure until it actually happens. If that ever happens, the are great no-cd sites out there.

Are you a developer or something? Im pretty sure Steam could come up with some kind of offline client if they ever needed. I think we dont have enough technical knowledge to talk about what is possible and what isnt.

Im pretty sure that being a behemont like Steam they wouldnt just shut down the servers, wave their consumers goodbye and say "fuck you all, i got your money bitchessss, now im outta here". There has to be a legal solution for that, especially after the recent EU ruling. And i think that if they go bankrupt they wont have to get permissions or whatever from IP holders, since there is no way of fulfilling the initial contracts.

Again, this is merely hypothetical. Steam is huge, Valve is one of the most profitable companies in the world and if they ever had financial issues, im pretty sure someone would come up, buy the company and keep the service going.

If we keep talking about hypothesis, i could say that keeping old games is useless anyway, since PCs 10 years from now will probably have lots of compability issues with recent games, let alone old ones we are already struggling with today. If we keep talking about hypothesis, then my argument makes a lot of sense.

Probably not for the more obscure titles, at least cracks that would be up to date. The problem with cracks quite often is that they are version specific, and most crackers who are for the glory are interested in cracking a game only when it is at version 1.0.

In all probability, you'd have to redownload pirated copies of many of the full games. And for that, you'd pretty much have to share it to others at the same time, which is illegal in most civilized countries, no matter whether you have purchased a license for the game you are pirating.

And yes, cracks and even full pirated versions of games are also used for injecting malware to people's machines. There are many known cases of this. It is common sense, that way you get people to run executables from sources they are not necessarily familiar with.

If it was that simple, then the aforementioned crackers would have already released cracked Steam and Origin clients which let you take any Steam game backup (without 3rd party DRM, they are another mix to the problem...) and start playing it in offline mode, without a need for re-activation. So unless there is already such a cracked client that works universally for all Steam game backups, without a need to download a separate crack for each Steam game individually... very improbable.

No one suggested a thriving company would go bankrupt overnight. Read the article again:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1680

Sure you could sue them. Don't expect to be first in the line getting any compensation though. The big creditors would be first in the line securing their money. Maybe if you are lucky, you'd get some compensation for the 20 year old games you can't play anymore.

In such a case some gamers' ability to play 20 year old games are last on the line from the creditors point of view. Most probably you'd have to seek for some kind of monetary compensation for the useless game licenses you have bought from them, not the re-activation of them. So better start digging for 20 year old proofs of purchase (the emails).

Nokia was huge (and in a way still is, I guess). It was easily the biggest and most profitable mobile phone manufacturer in the whole world not so long ago, for more than a decade. Some even felt it is untouchable because of Nokia's leading role with the biggest mobile phone OS (Symbian) and because people all over the world were just so accustomed to Nokia/Symbian phones that they wouldn't even want to learn to use anything else anymore, but just buy more Nokia phones. Then... something changed.

"But Steam/Valve has customer data which in invaluable!!!" So does MySpace, but for some reason Facebook just made it pretty much obsolete (and I don't think for a minute Facebook will be around forever either). The customer data matters only if it is relevant anymore. Like I said, the turn of events wouldn't probably happen overnight. Hardly ever does.

Remember that it isn't even enough Valve has lots of people with Steam accounts. What matters is whether people still buy more and more new games for those accounts, and don't just keep the account around for playing the occasional old Steam games they bought many years ago. Windows Store...

DRM is not an alternative point of failure for those, it is an _additional_ one. And one where you are the least in control.

Your argument is similar to saying that using a safety belt is stupid because you could still get killed for various other reasons while driving. Like having a stroke, driving off a cliff, being run over by a tank etc. As I said, a digital DRM-free copy is the version that you are the most likely to be able to still run in the distant future, with the least amount of hassle (or legal battles), even in the cases where Valve/Steam was still around.

I wonder if I would have been successful in suing Valve because I was suddenly unable to play Half-life 2 on the system for which I bought it and on which I played it for many years, until Valve actively denied me the possibility of doing that anymore? Maybe I would have even won the case and in the end I would have gotten a few bucks of compensation for the game.