The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[Jerik]

Originally Posted by razark

I shouldn't have to hope something is going to work when I buy it. I may buy a defective product once in a while, but I should not expect there to be a 50/50 chance it will be defective. I'd be running back and forth to the store quite a lot.

50/50 is a very unlikely probability for server use. Look at Steam -- this service has been running for years and I can only think of one or two times that it same down and prevented me from using my content.

Not to mention, verification is not exactly a high-intensity use of the server. Look at your average MMO -- WoW servers cater to about 10k players; Eve Online can support about 30k simultaneous players, and that's transmitting and calculating massive amounts of data.

Also, regarding the broadband argument: while only 60% of the US population may have broadband, the number of serious gamers with broadband -- ones who will be affected by this -- is probably much higher. I know there are always people who have dial up or something else and cannot manage the online connection, but they are not a large, or critical (in the gaming industry's eyes) population of players. I suspect they'll gladly lose the 5% of gamers who cannot play the game due to no internet if they feel it will stop piracy. Piracy is definitely a problem; the issue is whether these sorts of measures will decrease piracy (and force sales) or just decrease piracy without increasing sales. The former situation is certainly what they'd like; I suspect the latter is the more likely case.