@DeadlyRamon:
"Where music is concerned, I recommend that people stick to CDs, records, cassettes, or even 8-tracks and thus avoid DRM of their music altogether."

You obviously don't know much about the pervasiveness of DRM these days. You are just as likely to get DRM installed on your computer from a music CD as you are from a digital music distributor.

"Actual customers don't feel estranged when people who want to illegally obtain a game without paying for it find it difficult if not impossible to do so as a result of efforts the software developers took to protect their considerable investment. This is assuming that the methods in question don't handicap or frustrate legitimate owners/users of the software. "

I'm sorry but you are living in a fairy tale world and/or do not understand the nature of the problem. There will NEVER be a DRM that can stop or hinder "pirates." The "harder" it is to break the more groups will try and the faster it will be broken. Borderlands was cracked and on the net for the Xbox before the preload even began for steam preorders. The steam preload began on a friday and the release day was the following monday. Using that encrypted preload a PC version was on private trackers as early as Saturday and on public trackers everywhere by Sunday. The entire thing was decrypted, a cracked version that didn't need steam made, and uploaded to torrents around the world IN LESS THAN TWO DAYS.

DRM does NOTHING to pirates. Nothing AT ALL. It doesn't stop them or slow them down. To paying customers it either goes unnoticed or it gets in their way. Companies are PAYING for something that at best does nothing at all and at worst makes the legal version unplayable.

"The companies that bother developing and including measures that discourage the illegal duplication of software obviously feel otherwise. "

The companies that develop the DRM's are selling snake oil to gullible idiots. I'm sorry but that is what they are. They are paying someone for something that harms their investment and provides nothing in return. If their product sells then it sells in spite of their DRM not for it.

A CD key for multiplayer games is the only "DRM" that has ever worked at all. It stops someone who doesn't know how to use an internet search from casually copying their game and playing with their friends on it. Once you cross the threshold of "I know how to use google" knowledge their isn't a "DRM" on the planet that can stop anyone. Not even the ones that require you to be online to play singleplayer.

Edit: I apologize for my improper quoting. I can't seem to find the way to do it on this forum.

@gnarbrag

Maybe you should get in to more detail what Markus Persson said.

“Piracy is not theft,” he said. Referencing the most common anti-piracy argument, he said: “If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.”

“There is no such thing as a ‘lost sale’,” he said, debunking another popular myth. “Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?”

“Treat game development as a service,” he says. “Make a game last longer than a week. You can’t pirate an online account.”
(http://www.next-gen.biz/news/gdc-2011-piracy-is-not-theft-says-minecraft-creator)

He sure does point out that software piracy is not really like stealing anything. But he also says that there a several other points that have nothing to do with software pirates wich can influence the succes of a game.
(I found a blog post where he explains in detail what he thinks on this subject: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044/how-piracy-works)
And i guess he has a point in what he is saying because his game minecraft is doing fairly well and it is still not finished. I paid my 15€ and i dont regret it for a second. I even try to get other people to play it because, for me and millions of other players, its a good game
worth the money.
He needs no DRM because he is convinced that his game is good and will sell and it does.

But on the other hand he is an independent developer that has not to be judged by shareholders on how his company is doing. Wich is also a really good explanation why there are DRM after DRM. A good game will bought because its a good game. But right now there are not so much new games then there are new versions of games that where good in the previous instalment. In the end its not so much about the game as it is for the sales.

I think a lot of you guys are thinking in line with one of the motivations for this study. I just wanted to point out that the questions about review scores weren't just distraction questions, because I was thinking similarly as far as "the bottom line" and how review scores might influence that. These days, you're always hearing about stuff like bonuses for metacritic scores above a certain threshold because of the incredible impact stuff like that has. At the same time, there are some games out there that definitely have received at least a handful of negative scores as a direct result of their DRM. UbiSoft's stuff is the obvious example, and a look at the metacritic pages for Assassin's Creed 2 or Settlers 7 tells a pretty interesting story. I thought putting those questions in there would reflect that people really do feel DRM could adversely affect a game's score for them, and would expect reviewers to feel the same way. Maybe this sort of thing would help as far as getting developers to pay a bit more attention to this. After all, nobody wants their game to have really low user scores on aggregate sites because of the DRM, and the negative impact of that might outweigh the benefits of preventing piracy on a strictly "bottom line" business level.

I've mentioned this before in the thread, but I think there is a lot of merit in that point about DRM always being beaten is worth considering. From the perspective of the average consumer, all it really takes to download a copy of a game is to just look it up online, because people always find a way to beat the copy protection. It doesn't really matter if a game has really minimal DRM or really invasive DRM, because it doesn't necessarily translate into substantially more effort on the part of someone who wants to just download a copy. Beyond that, the implications that the company doesn't trust you and potential negative consequences of having that DRM on your machine might actually encourage someone to be more willing to pirate than they otherwise would (or at least, do nothing to dissuade them). That being said, I understand that the issue isn't black and white, and there's still a lot to uncover as far as the shades of gray. A lot of this stuff (like whether downloading a copy of a game can actually lead to purchase later down the line) was just a bit too complex to include in this first study, but I do think it's really interesting and would love to look into it later. We'll keep you guys posted on where we go from here. :)

Were winners already contacted?

I just hadn't seen a posting anywhere yet and figured my name was on the list. :)

Will we ever know if the game was real and which it was?
And what about results?

Buried on page 11 this forum is the answer.

The game was not real. And the DRM mentioned for your game was not the same DRM mentioned in everyone else's article. So, some people have very obtrusive DRM, some had minor DRM.

The results can be obtained by emailing Phil. Here is a quote form him:
-------------
Many thanks again to everyone for all your help. I'll update GOG with news on the project as it comes up. If you would like to be added to a mailing list for a copy of the paper when it's complete (if you haven't already) feel free to E-mail directly at filippo.cordaro@uni-koeln.de. If you have additional questions for me, feel free to ask them and I'll try to answer as much as I can!
----------------

Whoops,

Sorry guys, I thought this thread had died!

I already contacted the winners (sorry if you weren't one of them), and as Tallima helpfully points out, I made a more extensive post about the study on page 11 if people are still interested. For the time being, I'm happy to add people to the contact list for a copy of the paper / results as we make progress, but I will also notify GOG about this and make another post with some more extensive results in the future.

Have you considered simply launching the same survey on Steam and on either Ubisoft or EA forums, then comparing the results?
That would seem like an easy way to find the impact on the community's stance towards DRM on the survey (with Steam as medium and EA/Ubi being heavy).