So the comparison of customers walking out the door with unpaid for items to pirating software without drm is just a red herring? Bad analogy is still bad.
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well, yeah, I mean most piracy is the product of not being able to legitimately purchase the software, hence why you have less than 20% software piracy rates in countries where the software is easy to attain.
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Sure; but I started buying games from Steam before I stopped pirating altogether. They were my first step into legitimacy because of the prices (which have since gotten slightly less insane) and the convenience.
Still, you’re right. If I’m a Russian teen with zero chance of ever getting caught and no money, there’s absolutely no way I’m buying a game on Steam.
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That’s why I don’t buy products with online DRM. For exactly that reason.
Buying products with modern DRM requires indulging in the absurd fantasy that the vendor will provide product validation after the sale indefinitely, when there is no market incentive for them to do so, and ample evidence that real-world validation services are ephemeral.
You wouldn’t support a product for free forever - and neither will they. DRM validation is part of the product, and it costs money and generates no income. In empirical terms online DRM is just a form of planned obsolescence.
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Fair enough.
But I have to say that everything I buy, touch or hold will be eventually be lost, and likely sooner rather than later.
When I was younger, I also desired permanence. Now that I’m older, I realize that it was a futile quest.
Things get lost, get stolen, burn or nowadays become obsolete. Friends come and go, parents age and die, and children metamorphose into different new, different beings. In the few years, everything I value will end up in a junk heap, likely with my children cursing the fact that I held on to it. A few years after that, those things won’t even register as obsolete.
In other words, if I can enjoy something for a year or two, it owes me nothing. For anything I hope to last beyond that, I expect to be paying for the privilege in one for or another.
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As you say, fair enough. I have a different lifestyle; earlier this evening I was pulling rusted out bearings from a set of 45 year old electric motors preparatory to rebuilding them. The chair I’m sitting in is a family heirloom, and very comfy.
If game developers want to sell ephemera, they shouldn’t wonder that I’m not buying 
.
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In an alternate universe where DRM creates revenue and isn’t a cost, that could happen. But in that universe, game development would have died anyway, since DRM generates revenue without having to create a game.
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That sounds an awful lot like this universe with the way Steam has been going.
Color me “in awe”.
The fun part was building the tools to do the job, honestly.
You can tell by the bottle caps it was at least a two beer job 
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I’ve owned some items for decades. Sorry, analogy fail.
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A workbench my dad would be proud of. It certainly looks a lot like when we he’s servicing his 1950 Farmall Cub which is still in use at his cottage.
Sadly for him, his eldest (me) ended up being a software guy. On the other hand, my sister and brother are pretty handy with the power tools.
And 1917 model T For valve lifter? Okay, you make a pretty good argument for permanence :-).
What a great old tractor!* It’s likely to outlast both of us, with proper maintenance.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the history of agricultural tractors revolves around issues of Intellectual Property Protection - just as modern software users are poorly served by DRM’d products (in my opinion) the old farmers were often placed at a disadvantage by the corporate tractor vendors like Ford and Ferguson. The Farmall tractors were very good, but they did not have the standardized three-point hitch Ferguson invented (and Ford stole) so implements were rarer and therefore more expensive and subject to less evolutionary pressure.
* Caveat: for a gas burner. I’m doing all-electric tractors these days.
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