What's really sad about Bioshock is that the game itself is very polished and stable. I've had two complete run-throughs (bad guy and good guy) and only experienced one small glitch.

So it seems the price we have to pay for a quality game is rediculous DRM. And they certainly went overboard with Bioshock, requiring online activation AND a CD check, although the latter can be circumvented.

Personally, I have more games than I could ever hope to play. Some people buy shoes... some buy books... I buy games. So I always want to ensure that I'll be able to play any game I buy sometime in the future. However, with Bioshock, it seemed unlikely they'd ever release a patch to kill the DRM so I decided to just play it and get it over and done with.

And that wasn't a bad idea. Unlike a lot of games at GOG, Bioshock has very little replay value.

So I can pretty much chuck it in the bin now (I bought it at a bargain bin price) - and never have to worry about its DRM ever again :)

I've never had a problem with disc based DRM, e.g. Starforce.

However, I loathe activation-based DRM like Steam and limited activation systems like those at Direct2Drive, Gamesplanet etc. Going over limits and having to rely on customer support to be able to play my game is what pushed me over the edge.

Funny how Bioshock is brought up here. I was a vocal protestor against Bioshock 2's DRM (2K Elizabeth said it was less DRM'd than Bioshock...) and I wrote to all the games blogs I could think of to point out contradictions in her statements. Escapist and Rockpapershotgun used my info as source for their articles, everyone else ignored it unfortunately.

How I came to hate DRM:

The most vivid memory is a few years ago when I shared a flat with a friend and we shared a gaming "rig." We bought Divine Divinity from a bargain bin, installed it, and tried to launch the game. The ultra-paranoid SafeDisc CD-protection could never "verify" the disc and should shut us out each time we tried, even when the play disc *was* in the drive when we started the shortcut-launcher. It must have disliked the Daemon Tools and other virtual-drive programs we had installed on that machine. We had to resort to using a crack to play our "legal & legit" copy of the game.

This example of DRM is more a nuisance than what users of Bioshock and Spore and other games that required some draconian requirement (like a continual online connection), suffered in order to play. It left a sour taste in my mouth, however, and the PR image of DRM would forever be colored, no matter how publishers tried to rationalize it.

Part of the reason my own gaming tapered off significantly post 2005 (besides my favorite developers folding and the PC gaming model shifting significantly) was the trend towards more and more DRM schemes build-in games you bought even in a brick-and-mortal store or on physical data like discs. Also requirements to "activate" games, or log into third-party places like Steam, never sat well with me. I know it doesn't bother a lot of gamers, including many on this site, but I prefer my gaming to be cleanly bifurcated from my online life and presence unless I chose otherwise, hence while GOG is such an oasis in the current climate.

Guess I've been lucky. My only problem with DRM was Sam & Max Season 1 disc not being recognized as legit a couple times for whatever reason.

Oh and Steam sometimes takes forever to start up :(

And I guess some games like Crysis would likely run better without DRM taking up valuable resources.

Even had Starforce installed without my knowledge for several months (courtesy of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones), and didn't seem to cause any issues. Of course I uninstalled it as soon as I learned of it.

Well you certainly didn't give in as easily as I did. It's just unfortunate that the cracked version was detected as a virus too. So I gave up on that as well.

Yeah, that's right, virus scanners thought that the retail version of Bioshock was a virus - because it was.

A proper virus scanner will scan for the abilities, not necessarily whether the application is known to do that sort of thing. It can be a pain, I just wish they wouldn't be so diligent about moving or deleting files without confirmation. Plus, assuming that a file is different because it's in a different path isn't helpful to the end user.

No. But to be completely honest, it wasn't in any one way wrong about Bioshock. It was malware. The problem was that it didn't detect that the crack had nullified the harmful aspects of the DRM.

Y'know, I kinda get what you mean, just not entirely sure how to explain it. (Something about being disconnected in my own little world, versus having notifications pop up whenever I "achieve" some silly thing.)

Yeah, looks like the company took down Blupi 1 and apparently Blupimania. Is Blupimania isometric? (And I guess there are several Blupi games, like a "Blupi at Home", "Planet Blupi," etc.)
http://www.ceebot.com/

Hmm, here's http://www.epsitec.ch/, but apparently no English option.

I've hated DRM for a long time, but my most recent ordeal was with Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate. I bought it on steam and was able to play it once. The next time I started the game it told me my DLC was not activated. I went to "Load game" instead of "continue" and got around it, but a new problem cropped up. Every 4 minutes the game would log me out of EA's servers. I would pause the game to log in, only to find that I *was* logged in. 4 minutes later, "logged out" again.

So after failing to find help on forums (almost all of EA's older forum links are dead), I went on EA chat. We went around in circles, 3 chat sessions and many dozens of gigabytes of downloads later no progress was made (although one of the guys did give me a second copy of the game at one point to help troubleshoot. Yay, two broken games). So I called EA support. I didn't get any help from the first call but the second guy had me change some 1's to 0's in a file called activation.txt and that fixed the activation problem. No one, however, was able to fix the problem of the constant log-outs. They just blamed it on my ISP.

They gave me a $20 gift coupon which I used to buy Spore, which lead to more headaches.

I think the reason they don't abolish DRM is pride. If they get rid of DRM, it would look like they were giving up and the pirates win. Really the opposite is true, because the pirates would be out of work. No DRM, nothing to crack, no fun for the pirates. They are no longer needed.

I'm sorry. I guess it's a good thing that I refused to buy that one due to DRM concerns. It's a shame that they didn't give you something good as a peace offering.

Yeah, it was an isometric puzzle game where you had to get a blindfolded Blupi to a balloon. He moved by himself and you had to manipulate the environment to guide him. Can't remember much more...

I don't hate DRM. "Hate" is a much too strong word for me to apply to anything really. I have, however, had an unfortunate experience with DRM and Beyond Good and Evil, which, as soon as the game had finished installing, the DRM acts up and decides to completely remove the game again (on 64-bit Vista and 7).

On the other hand, DRM has got me to buy stuff I maybe otherwise wouldn't - namely ObjectDesktop, Mass Effect, and Windows 7:
* A pirated version of WindowBlinds gave me black desktop and broken themes (I wondered why it happened, looked it up, found a thread on Stardock's support forum where one user had asked about it, Wardell had replied "buy the software instead of pirating it", and another user complained "you can't do such a thing, users will think the software is broken and won't buy it").
* For Mass Effect, I couldn't find a crack that worked correctly with an update to the game, so the star map wouldn't work.
* As for Windows 7 - I was simply annoyed enough by needing to get new keys every once in a while for XP and Vista, so I caved in and bought 7 shortly before the RC stopped working (as well as buying it for the laptop as I wanted an English retail version rather than the Swedish OEM that was available for less than 1/5 of the price). Only once I got the discs did I become aware that it was an upgrade license, so even though I bought them one of my copies still isn't completely legit.

Then again. DRM-freeness has got me to buy 180-odd games here that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bought for download otherwise.

Well, I came home from work expecting to squander a little time playing Assassins Creed 2 and this is happening.

How very informative that error message is. I guess it's Ubisoft's way of saying, "no user serviceable parts inside."

My adventures with DRM can be compressed into these words: Bulletstorm and Game For Windows Live. 6 hours took me to successfully run the game, which I've finished after another 6 hours.

Sold the game along with the account for 1/5 the price. I love ye, Chmielarz and PCF team, but sorry, downloading countless patches/libraries/frameworks/other craps just to make GfWL frontend run correctly and play short game is not my cup of tea. (not picking on Bulletstorm, it's an awesome game and really stands out among the genre)