Being a huge fan of Butcher Bay (which imho is one of the best shooters I've ever played), I was really dismayed to find that Dark Athena comes with horrendous DRM, even on Steam.
The offer on Steam for Dark Athena is really good though, but I was still hesitant to buy anything with such horrible DRM. Sniffing around Google for Dark Athena's DRM, I came across this post from a QA guy working at Starbreeze.
http://forum.starbreeze.com/viewtopic.php?id=574
I changed my mind about not buying the game. The anti-DRM stance from even the devs of the game just warms the cockles of my heart, that I'd feel bad not buying it just because of DRM ;)

I still won't get it as the activations are non-refundable. And with Tages that means REALLY non-refundable. Their solution is to call customers pirates and leave it at that.

But don't forget this.
Notice: After activating the third time your product using TAGES a 30-day timer starts. After 30 days you will get that activation back up to 3 total activations.

I, for one, will never get the boxed version (and thankfully I didn't. I'd almost picked it up last week, before I even knew it had TAGES). But, I'd really like to play the game, and seeing the dev's comments makes me feel bad if I have to pirate it. So, it's either not buy it, like Navagon, or get it on Steam.
Best case scenario would be to buy it right now, and pray that Atari wakes up its bleeping idea.

Yes they did remove the "NO MORE ACTIVATIONS EVA" thing. It still may be a pain but you are missing out on a quality game because of it.

Ah, so it is refunded then. That's not so bad. It's just a case of making sure your third installation lasts a month.