Poll: How much DRM is too much?

[The Almighty Aardvark]

You're missing code wheels and instruction manuals. It was always annoying to have the game interrupted and need to dig out the booklet to find word 8 on paragraph 3 of page 22. I never was able to finish the Lost Dutchman's Mine before the internet, because we'd lost the manual.

I didn't even think of those, at the very least it's kind of nice that those have more or less gone by the wayside, internet's pretty much completely invalidated both. I'll add them to the list anyways though

But more I think about it more I honestly feel the best drm is actually just regular support and updates of your game. Pirated versions are always going to be static and a pain to update, if one feels they are being treated nice by the devs for being a legit customer then it'll make the legit version better and therefore the one everyone wants.

That's kind of why I don't mind Steam's DRM at all. I gain more from their client than I lose from their DRM, I'm not sure I've ever actually been inconvenienced by it

 

[Azure-Supernova]

I can deal with clients like Steam and Origin, they function as a store and community hub with some added functionality as well as DRM. But if I need to create yet another account on top of the one I hold with the client, that's too much. UPlay and GFWL are worthless services that only act as a hinderance to what is supposed to be a quick and easy way to play.

 

[barbzilla]

Honestly I hate the concept of DRM. For one, it is ineffective at any level short of always online, and since many paying customers don't have the internet connection for an always online game it must be ruled out as a reasonable solution. Any other type of DRM has been and is being defeated. Even the supposedly uncrackable Denuvo DRM was cracked and their games are pirated regularly (I especially hate Denuvo as it causes massive amounts of issues and performance hits).

Now the game developer has to pay the company that makes the DRM to be allowed to use it in their game. Which means the developer is taking money away from content development or bug fixes to add in an ineffective solution to a problem that has been around as long as there has been entertainment. These "solutions" usually scale from minor inconvenience all the way to making the game completely unplayable on the player's system, meanwhile the Pirated versions of these games are still coming out, and manage to do so with the DRM either defeated and shut down or completely stripped from the game entirely. The developers really need to ask themselves if it is worth it to pay a company to add software to their game that will only serve to ensure that the Pirates release better versions of their game than they can (note: I am not condoning Piracy, in fact Piracy is the other side of the DRM coin one would not exist without the other).

Now all of that said, I still put up with DRM. I use Steam, PSN, and XBLive Digital Downloads fairly regularly and generally speaking, I am not affected that much by the standard DRM on those systems. However when the devs or publishers decide they need to stack on additional DRM to those systems (I.E. Denuvo, SecuRom, UPlay, ect) it irks me as it starts to interfere with my ability to play the game without either taking a few minutes to start up all of the services it requires or causes the game to not run to its full potential ruining my enjoyment of said game.

 

[votemarvel]

The instant I feel I am being punished for being a paying customer is the moment I hate DRM.

This happened years ago with the unskippable anti piracy ads on DVDs. Those ads that the pirates didn't have to watch because they were stripped from pirate copies.

DRM only hurts those people who are willing to pay for a product.