Had to make an account just in order to reply to this thread. Before I begin, I'd like to thank LordZ and Seldon for their very civil and informative inputs, which have made my morning coffee ritual that much more entertaining.
I, however, would like to turn the spotlight to a somewhat different issue, which has been blatantly overlooked for the most part by previous commenters. Some backstory first: I live in SEE, a largely non-existent market for the games industry (our stores have only started stocking original games in the last 3-4 years). Yet I have been a hardcore gamer for the better part of the last 20 years. To say that I (and the rest of the society here) have been indulging in pirating would be a serious understatement. There is (or rather, was) no other option, besides buying originals once every 3-4 years when you got the Get Out Of Jail Free card (otherwise known as the travelling visa). So yes, in the past 20-odd years I've bought 4 original PC games. 3 of those were bought in the mid 90's, and the last one was Mass Effect, some two years back.
Now, to the meat of my argument: I cannot possibly start to describe my disappointment with what has happened to boxed editions of games. For all intents and purposes, I came right out of a time capsule form the 1994's issue of Dark Suns 2: Wake of the Ravager, with it's extensive and exquisitely written manual, a bestiary that I took with myself and studyed for two years untill my mind boggled. The box itself was something a kid would proudly put on a shelf and covet.
So there I am at a Virgin store on Oxford St, London, looking at the hyped up ME. I fork out the cash and rush home. I open the "box" (look how slim it was, I wondered). My eyes widen in disbelief. It's a 4-page quickstart guide and a measily disc. OH MY GOD. Where is my... my stuff? I fully expected a host of memorabilia and lore to be found in tangible form, together with the game, just like it used to be with Loom, Descent, Dark Sun and Rebel Assault (the entirety of my original gaming shelf).
Having studied marketing and advertising, I am fully aware that what I have experienced as the usual practice in boxed game retail is now considered to be a 20$ extra, as in Gold, Platinum, Kryptonite editions and what have you. As a hardcore gamer with a considerable experience under my belt, I can also compare the experiences and periceved quality of these newer games and make a (rather biased) judgment that they are watered down, poorly written, mass produced crap fests of special effects.
But enough of that. What I am convolutely saying, as a sort of a time traveller that I am, is that today's games aren't worth it, IMHO. For all the environmentalist BS about saving trees by not printing manuals, they've taken away what I considered essential to gaming - immersion, and spent that money to produce often meaningless prettier visuals and expensive advertising campaigns. The issue is much more complicated than "mean suits ruining my hobby", of course. Going digital has its sacrifices and the coveted manual seems to be one of them. The western society, vting with their wallets, decided that added-value items (lovely boxes and extra content) can go away, by bying games that didn't feature it, except in the Gold Edition form.
In a sense, the publishing business has stabbed itself in the back by taking on this approach: by pursuing cost savings described above, they have stripped their products of the intrinsic qualities that made having an original game a must, for any serious gamer. So, comes the DRM, which in itself is not a solution to the original problem, but rather a sloppy band-aid on the wound.
tl;dr
Gaming as a hobby is suffering from a rapidly spreading disease of low quality goods, stripped completely of what had made them wanted in the first place. Artificial hype building through marketing activities can only account for so much, therefore measures like DRM are introduced in order to cope with the diminishing returns. In my view, all boxed games need to come with more added value, as they once did. Pirating would still occur, but the memorabillia would make it obligatory for anyone who is a true fan to actually own the original.
