I really want to know what people think about a practice I have heard of.
I buy games, a lot of games. I want to support games I like, so I buy them. But I hate DRM, additional subprograms and CD requirements.
What do you think of using cracked or "illegitimate" versions of games when you have a fully paid official copy that sits on your self?
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Most of my PC games are legal copies of the game, but illegally modified:
I buy the game at Fred Meyer, take it home, install it, then copy it and remove all the junk. This way, whenever I load it up, I get to skip the several minutes of credits or advertising or are-we-there-yet junk screens telling me how many cool companies had a hand in making the game.
so, yeah, I prefer my mod'd copy.
I do the same thing with DVDs I buy for the kids. I either rip the DVD to iTunes using HandBrake, or I copy the DVD. Either way, I keep the original, expensive DVD away from the peanut butter-coated fingers of the toddlers, and I save myself hundreds of dollars in forced purchases as my kids watch previews of DVDs they don't have and I can't menu- or fast-forward through.
I'd say the companies should be happy that you're willing to do that.
I have passed over a couple of games entirely because of their idiotic restrictions. When I hear something like "Yeah, I bought that game, but couldn't play it yet, because the game thinks I already installed it 3 times and won't let me install it again" I get the overwhelming desire not to give that company any money, and frankly lose my confidence in them, so I won't bother with their game.
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I always avoid unreasonable DRM measures. The only exception was Mass Effect, but I only played that long enough for a save to load into Mass Effect 2. I never buy a Steam title if it includes additional DRM; I'm wasting enough memory and processor cycles on Steam as it is, I don't need some worthless software getting lodged into the kernel and causing problems somewhere else.
I tend to do other things while playing a game (media editing, browsing, etc.) so any unnecessary tasks ruin the experience. I've never had any problems with SecuROM software inclusions, but I've had to troubleshoot some of the software's handiwork on other people's machines.
In addition, I will do everything in my power to prevent ads/credits from loading at launch. I truly hate this; at least they could allow the user to skip it all. A new brand of evil are the lazy console ports that require a PC user to press any key to continue to the menu. Are you kidding me, developers? Remove the garbage before you send the image off to the distributors. Dragon Age 2 has one of the fastest load times I've ever seen, but is tainted by the "Press any key to continue" filth that drags my experience down by seconds.
Like KaeYoss and Necromancer, I tend to avoid any game I know is going to have restrictive DRM and other "protection" measures that largely succeed only in screwing over paying customers. I am not going to spend $50 on a game that I can only hope will work. It's part of my general philosophy: make it difficult for me to spend money on you, and I'll take my money elsewhere.
I never buy a video game on release anymore, and wait for customer reports to review/report problems (also useful since most on-release PC games are buggy anyway). I also go to a Website, Reclaim Your Game which evaluates games based on DRM and general user-friendliness as regards installation, and has a list of all the games with one of the most problematic pieces of DRM software, SecuROM (the software which got EA massively sued because it broke several people's computers upon installation of Spore, Mass Effect, or some of the Sims 2 expansions. Sometimes the RYG reports are toned even to me to be TOO overzealous but they are still an incredibly useful resource and a good way to know the risks you're taking if you want to buy and install a game.
There are two cases where I bought games that would not work properly on my computer because of additional crap that I didn't know about---a SecuROM issue, in fact, caused some startup/launcher issues for Neverwinter Nights 2, which was bypassed by downloading a CD crack (Atari later had SecuROM removed from NWN2 after they saw the lawsuits flying in after EA and didn't want to be caught in the same boat). The other case was Fallout 3, where its attempts to phone home to Windows Live caused my game to freeze 90% of the time, within the first 5 minutes of playing if not on startup, so I had to install a hacked .dll to bypass that "phone home" option. Both games were purchased legitimately and I had nothing weird on my computer that should have causes problems, but I had problems regardless.
Generally, I don't want to pirate games--even if I own a legit copy--because I don't want to legitimize piracy by increasing their user numbers (and I'm not sure if the risk of viruses and trojans via torrenting is any better than the rootkit crap some game publishers try to sneak onto your machine). But as publishers make their games more and more difficult to use--digital distribution, for all its conveniences, also increases that inconvenience--absolutely, it becomes tempting. But probably, if mainstream games become effectively more trouble than they're worth, I will just end up trying to stick to indie games that are DRM free or just come with simple disk checks and the like. And the DRM free oldskool games on GOG, that MiB points out.
A new brand of evil are the lazy console ports that require a PC user to press any key to continue to the menu. Are you kidding me, developers? Remove the garbage before you send the image off to the distributors.
Forget PC ports. Why is this in the game to begin with? Why do consoles need that?
Same with save points. Might have been a good idea back in the days when consoles used those memory cards. That's a thing of the past, however. Today's consoles have actual hard disks in them. Hundreds of gigabytes worth of storage. So even if a player generates a couple hundred megs worth of savegames after one playthrough, it's no as if that even shows up. And you can always delete them afterwards.