Time4Tea: 2) Your use of the term 'infighting' is interesting. I don't see the 'gaming community' as united in any sense. I don't see Ross or others like him (who have been buying/supporting DRMed products over the past 20 years) as 'one of us' or part of our community. Gamers who buy DRMed products are literally
the problem, since they are the ones who have enabled and normalized these pernicious design practices.
No. DRM is not necessarily the same as forced end-of-life of games. You can still use and play any of the ancient DRMd DVDs. Only through the abuse of the internet for DRM purposes has it become an actual problem, in which, funnily, indeed the thief is the company, and the victim is the buyer (and, in the original sense of thief even, because, contrary to the classic "software piracy", there now
is one party losing something they used to own, not just get a copy of something). Looks like "online piracy" has been reversed and now it is
us who need to combat this new form of corporate piracy. And this initiative tried to, but was made to fail by the nay- and doomsayers among us. Let's just hope there will still be some nuclear-bomb-style legislation, like what the DMCA is for the corps, that mandates and enforces
our rights, in the end.
Of course DRM in all its forms presents uneccessary problems, and ultimately cost, but none of that were as grave (quite literally) as those inherent with internet-based DRM schemes. So don't think I'm "on the pro-DRM side" just because I don't consider abolishing DRM to be
the panacea to game ownership and preservation. In fact, if a workable end-of-life plan would be mandated by law, DRM would end up removed after the games "useful service life" on reasons of cost alone (no corp would want to keep paying 25k/month for leaving DRM in their abandoned games), so this might actually have turned into a win-win, if it had only worked out.
Time4Tea: 3) As soon as you start saying things like 'DRM is ok', 'developers should be free to design their games how they choose', you are immediately going to lose the entire DRM-free community. Anyone who is part of the DRM-free community could have told Ross that, but he apparently failed to understand this.
Yes, but at the same time you remove an easy opportunity for anti-campaigners to insta-destroy your political credibility by labeling you as "commie nutjob who wants to legalise piracy". Sadly, the anti-DRM crowd took up the pitchforks and did the discrediting themselves.