DRM does not and cannot stop pirates.What it does do is prevent re-sales of legit software, hence why many companies have a "X# installs" policy on games. What they want is to stop folk like yourself and myself from buying the game, then once finished with it, giving it to Jim whom later gives it to Bob and so on...The maths is fairly obvious, originally there was Z potential customers, but due to swapping of media, 1 person can supply a game to many people, when the idea instead is to sell the game to many people. So things like Steam came into existence, which rigorously enforce this 1-copy-per-person idea, and fair enough/good on them/pat on the back, but it's still punishing your legitimate consumer base when pirates wait 2 weeks and get the game completely free, often without all the extra overhead, tedious disk swapping, not needing an active internet connection for strictly singleplayer games and a whole variety of other idiotic things easily circumvented by internet piracy groups such as [RELOADED].The worst part is what happened to Titan quest, for those who remember, it was reputedly PLAGUED with game crashes for some people, yet others reported that the game ran absolutely fine. Interestingly, the proportion of legitimate purchases and pirated copies went very closely with the proportions of complaints being received about the games "issues". By that I mean, it emerged that only some 20% or so of all people playing titan quest were using legally obtained copies.Iron Lore; the developers, shortly before their collapse as a company, stated that Titan quest deliberately crashed on copies that either were not or could not have been authenticated, ie, that the overwhelming majority of crash-bug related complaints on the forums were occuring at *very* specific locations and *very* frequently was because the game had been deliberately programmed to, and that it was easy to spot the incredible degree of piracy simply by observing the numbers of people complaining about the aforementioned "issues".Tragically the problem doesn't end there, some 41% of gamers rely on word of mouth for their game advertising, which means most of those people who were interested in the game instead learnt on forums and throw word of mouth that the game was extremely buggy and by proxy just generally bad.. yet the game received a lot of positive reviews and even survived long enough to warrant an expansion. All of this suggests that it was not the developers desires that were wrong, merely their execution. If instead that the pirated copies molested the players screen with "buy me already" every 30 minutes, in addition to dropping to desktop with a "buy me if you like me" shareware-style approach then perhaps their sales would have looked better. More importantly their reputation as a competent studio would not have been blemished by releasing a "buggy" game instead of merely one that aggressively disputes illegal copies of itself.In conclusion; provided that DRM is handled tastefully (ie a one time online 'unlocking' or similar) then most players would not have a problem, but so far, between TW1, Sins of a Solar Empire and other recent titles that have completely abandoned DRM due to the psychological/technical issues listed above in favour for an "honesty box" format that has obviously worked quite well, what with TW1 selling 1.2 million copies as a computer game.Evidently it's the console players who are the big offenders when it comes to singleplayer games, I know several people with modded xbox's that are running pirated games, all stored locally on the consoles hard drive. Computer players are rather honest, really, judging by the ridiculous number of MMOs out there.
