An example of a DRM'd service that people don't mind?
Steam.
The reason a lot of people don't mind using Steam is that it doesn't sacrifice accessibility for security. Sure, you can't sell the games that you buy on Steam, but you can install them on as many machines as you want, willing you're logged into Steam one computer at a time (unless, of course, there's a secondary DRM "solution", like SecuROM on some EA-published Steam titles). And often times, there are a lot of financial initiatives to buying digitally through Steam, like their package deals for games from a certain publisher or developer or their weekly/holiday sales that can take a huge chunk out of the price of a game.
The thing is, most DRM-schemes come at the expense of the consumer. Or possibly worse, they're realistically zero-sum but apparently non-zero sum situations, where there really is no huge expense to the consumer and yet the lack of "more than enough" positive factors makes someone just dread the idea of having a somewhat inconvenient product.
At this point, I'm just waiting for the 3 GaSpeedSpecial to be announced in three or four months with excellent new features like "select all" and "cut and paste" that have never been seen before.
Get rid of that terrible glossy screen. I was in search of a netbook just a couple weeks ago, and I ended up getting the 1000HE because as a student, I simply couldn't bother with a glossy screen.
Wow, this is pretty great. I know that my SNES took a trip to the dumpster a long time ago and I have a box of SNES games sitting around gathering dust, like he mentions... I would love something like this for sure.
I had something that looks identical to this box, only it was black and had a different brand name. Clearly it's an older version, as the greatest resolution it outputs at is 1440x900. But in the time that I had it, as a college student with no television, I was pretty satisfied using it. There were some weird contrast issues, but I'm not sure if that was more the fault of my budget monitor or the product similar to this one. It scaled to monitor resolutions by stretching the pixels, not by lopping any off, if I remember correctly.
Entelligence: Have we demonized DRM?
Sep 24th 2009 6:56PM (Engadget)Steam.
The reason a lot of people don't mind using Steam is that it doesn't sacrifice accessibility for security. Sure, you can't sell the games that you buy on Steam, but you can install them on as many machines as you want, willing you're logged into Steam one computer at a time (unless, of course, there's a secondary DRM "solution", like SecuROM on some EA-published Steam titles). And often times, there are a lot of financial initiatives to buying digitally through Steam, like their package deals for games from a certain publisher or developer or their weekly/holiday sales that can take a huge chunk out of the price of a game.
The thing is, most DRM-schemes come at the expense of the consumer. Or possibly worse, they're realistically zero-sum but apparently non-zero sum situations, where there really is no huge expense to the consumer and yet the lack of "more than enough" positive factors makes someone just dread the idea of having a somewhat inconvenient product.
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