[quote]I thought we were long over the DRM hump but...
DRM does not make it any harder for 99% of people to steal a game.. Any moron can fire up bittorrent and head to a torrent site which is not hard to find at all (hell one is in the top 20 most popular sites on the internet...) and download a game, following ~5 instructions on how to install it.
You have to realize that a
huge majority of computer users are dumb. It does make it more difficult for a lot of people. They either don't want to risk pirating a game, or they don't have the know-how, etc. You'd be surprised at how many people have difficult renaming or moving files around on their computer. Then you bring in all of the torrent programs, tools to extract everything, mounting the images, installing it, copying over a crack, etc. There's less people out there that know how to do that than there are that do. So it still helps.
But at that point what changes from a simple CD Check compared to online activation?
I fully admit when I was a little noob way back in the day, I tried copying my friends Roller coaster tycoon game only to be stopped by what is now considered very simple copy protection.
I do have to say though I fully agree with you, they did a pretty good job implanting their DRM, It was 4 days before it was decently cracked, 6-7 days before a Good crack came out. But they did fail in my eyes on one part, the randomly placed anti piracy checks, a very small amount of people (That have bought the game, primarily (exclusively?) on steam) have triggered them for some reason. Those triggers cause corrupted saves.
The cracks physically remove those triggers so now legitimate users are stuck with something that is VERY unlikely to happen to them but still a potential issue.
Titan Quest had these same triggers and the reason it took someone so long to use such a horrible thing again... TQ's reputation got tarnished as a horribly buggy game, corrupted saves, crashes and a bunch of shit because of the anti piracy triggers within the game. People hear that its buggy and skip it.
Unfortunately for Rockstar they cannot blame their failure on piracy. Considering the only people that were able to report the status of the game for the first 4 days were early legal adopters of the game.