Top Ten Most Annoying DRM Methods Of All Time

[SenseOfTumour]

Anyone else think Earthbound and the space game have the genius idea for copy protection? IF it's detected that you're playing a pirate version of the game, the game becomes steadily more frustrating, and then randomly crashes / wipes saves / uninstalls itself after a few hours into the game, while making sure it doesn't offer too many clues early on, so pirates have to play thru the early game over and over trying to find a working copy.

Eventually it might be easier to just go out and BUY the game.

On another note...

Did I miss a meeting, people are getting on the internet to complain that they need the internet to play games?

It's like Steam are demanding you have air available when you want to install a new game.

You've got it, therefore there's no problem, unless you're just desperately trying to find something to complain about.

Also, remember, once installed, you DON'T need to be online to play single player games, just make sure it's updated and patched, then set steam to offline mode. No problem, no need to be online.

 

[AdamAK]

-snip-

No offense, but why the hell are you necro-ing old posts such as these? The news in the OP is kind of outdated and there's not that much to add to the topic, other than the usual (anti)piracy things.

Anyway:

Did I miss a meeting, people are getting on the internet to complain that they need the internet to play games?

Keep in mind that we may have an internet connection right now but not in places like trains, airplanes, your grandmother's house, et cetera. Internet connections aren't that freely available yet.

 

[oliveira8]

Did I miss a meeting, people are getting on the internet to complain that they need the internet to play games?

Keep in mind that we may have an internet connection right now but not in places like trains, airplanes, your grandmother's house, et cetera. Internet connections aren't that freely available yet.

Doesn't many air companies forbid the use of Laptop during flight these days anyway? Also you could have given better examples and not silly places. You could have just said "What happens when your internet is down during sometime and its not your fault?"

 

[AdamAK]

Did I miss a meeting, people are getting on the internet to complain that they need the internet to play games?

Keep in mind that we may have an internet connection right now but not in places like trains, airplanes, your grandmother's house, et cetera. Internet connections aren't that freely available yet.

Doesn't many air companies forbid the use of Laptop during flight these days anyway? Also you could have given better examples and not silly places. You could have just said "What happens when your internet is down during sometime and its not your fault?"

Those aren't silly places at all. I travel by train for nearly an hour every day, and I know others who spend several hours in the train every day, so I could be playing something in the mean time. Furthermore, it's nice to have access to video games during long and boring flights. I'm also going on vacation ( by airplane ) to Warsaw, and I'll be staying at my grandmother's house. None of these places have direct internet access, and I spend a lot of time in those places.

And Air companies don't prohibit the use of laptops. They even have a power plug in the Business class seats, which you can use so that your laptop doesn't run out of power.

 

[jamesworkshop]

Steams fine as DRM if steam dies there are plenty of steam hacks and cracks

 

[SenseOfTumour]

Having grown up with dongles, code wheels, and those horrible see thru plastic lenses, the Lenslok, half the time you having to guess the code anyway, maybe that's partly why I'm happy with Steam. I think most people mad at Steam never had to look up words in instruction manuals or read a dark blue code printed on a slightly darker blue code sheet, or had tried to use the Lenslok to read a blur on a screen, when they hadn't taken into account the fact you might be playing on a 12" or a 40" tv.

As for necroing the thread, I just noticed it at the bottom of the Escapist site, I'm guessing it can't have been under latest content, maybe it was under another heading, but I certainly just followed a link from the front page.

As I said in my original post, once you've installed a single player game, you can set it to offline mode and play it with no internet connection. I'm not saying Steam is perfect, just that the idea that you can't play games without needing a constant connection is flatly not true, and its compounded by the fact anyone I offend with this post enough to reply to me has enough internet to reply, and therefore enough to use steam and set their single player games to offline mode.

I argue that, unless the original publisher decides to shoehorn them in anyway, Steam games come with no cd key, no registration, no need to keep a cd in the drive, hell, no cd, and most of the reasons people dislike Steam are 'what if' reasons rather than actual valid ones. Tho I'm fully accepting of people who had a bad time in the early days when Steam was finding it feet and making mistakes, it's a pretty good,reliable system now.

I just wish they'd reduce prices, to take into consideration that there's no production costs, no mailing physical items, no faulty goods to return etc. They should also look into reducing prices to reflect that you cannot resale things you have bought, which is a fair negative of Steam.

 

[Lord Krunk]

I don't like Steam primarily because I think it's completely unreasonable that a single-player game should require an internet connection in order to play. It's ridiculous.

Only Mass Effect, which is a completely different kind of DRM. I've played single player Steam games offline before.