I don't think you understand the problem of hosting those servers at all.

It took forever for those private Wow servers to come up because pirates don't have access to the code running on Blizzard servers.

The same would be true if suddenly games like Diablo 3, KZ3 or AC decided to follow the same model.

You have to get a legit app and reverse engineer all communications it makes to the server and then build your own server code that mimic those, it's a tremendous amount of work.

Definitly not something that would be available at the release of the software.

And honestly I don't think most publishers care much if private servers mimicking theirs come up 6 months after the release of the product (especially in the case of non MMORPGS games with a limited lifetime...).

Technically for developers, building games that work this way is feasible right now, it's not really that hard. Ship the graphic engine, put the rest of the game on a server, not trivial but not that hard either and once you've done it for one game it's easy to learn from the experience and replicate it for later games...

You asked for DRM that worked, I proved you wrong that WoW's DRM stopped I guess membership piracy? idk wtf you would call it. Who cares how long it took to make the private servers, it still happened, and Blizzard loses memberships because of it. That seems to be failed DRM of an MMORPG to me.

And yes, I'm pretty sure Activision does with the modded MW2 since it makes MW2 work differently then what they wanted ie stop gamers from caring about the PC version.

"Crysis 2 is released on March 22, but if you've got a little time and even less scruples, you can play it right now. With almost depressing inevitability, an entire developer build of the game has been leaked online, allowing PC gamers early, free access to Crytek's latest eye-shagger. Killzone 3 was also recently leaked."

I stopped reading there..... doesn't that very paragraph puts PS3 gamers on teh same level as PC gamers? no? article fails.

What? There are hundreds of thousands of people who play WoW on pirvate servers. But that's even besides the point. The point is that it is circumventable, and if the game isn't an MMO, why wouldn't people circumvent it? What's the incentive there? If I'm playing Dragon Age, a singleplayer game, and I'm required to always be online, what incentive is there to not get the readily available pirated version which doesn't require a connection?

Come to think of it, when I want to play Dragon Age on the PC, I can't access any saves until the game logs into my EA account because their DRM requires that I be logged in to access any of the extra content.

That's so annoying especially when it doesn't log in right away. I've had to wait a while a few times just to be able to access my saves.

You guys are thick...

Because if Dragon Age is designed so that half of the game engine is on EA's server that pirated version isn't going to be available the day Dragon Age releases.

Cracking the Game won't do shit if half of the game isn't on the disk but is client/server..

Do you guys talking of piracy and DRM all the time even know what it entails to crack a game ?

Cracking DRM isn't technically that hard. Find the places in the software where the licencing calls are made and stub them out...

Cracking a client/server app is a lot more complex.

You have to analyze the data flow between the client and the server and then develop software that will behave the same way the real server would. It is not fast nor easy to do...

Cracking Wow took several man years...

Which publisher is going to care that Dragon Age has been cracked  by the time Dragon Age 3 comes out...

Wait wait stop. Your solution to piracy, a problem which has yet to be proven to signifficantly affect actual profits/income on a game, is to force publishers to host costly servers with massive amounts of data on them for every single person to play every single singleplayer game? Wow...

Business are starting to do it everywhere. Moving from full client to client-server app.

Gaming companies will too in time.

It offers them a lot more control and allow more possibilities for pricing for example( or demos, once you have a sure switch that can cut users off the game, it's a lot easier to offer free limited in time demos).Or even for advertising, once you know who your customers are for Dragon Age it is a lot easier to get them interested in Dragon Age 2 or any DLC... Or bug fixing....

Besides the idea that running a server is a costly thing for business is false.

With the advent of VMware it's relatively cheap and load balancing has become a lot easier.

As for the cost of the massive data, it's really not that much , heck Gmail gives 10Gb for free to every user ( 7.5Gb for Gmail and 2G for Gdocs).

The costs for bandwidth have gone down tremendously too (as I was saying in an earlier post Netflix bandwidth costs are 3 cents/Gig)

Sure for the first game there would be a cost but once you have several games the costs go down a lot and as the number of users for one game go down, they get replaced by users for a newer more recent game...

What exactly do you think Onlive are trying to do with their new service ( except they host the whole game instead of  having client/server).

This is what the cloud is about.  And it will be coming to every day users within 10 years....

Same thing for consoles within 2 gen, all purchases will be digital and you will only have a small client on your drive...

10 years ago this would have seemed like scifi but the advent of VMware and it's competitors has really changed everything...

You have noticed that onlive is a complete failure right? Cloud functionality is more useful for saved games and networked apps and thats about it.

So you say the only source of revenue for video games is the sale of the game itself.

I would like to introduce you to some friends of mine. Their names, in order of how wrong they show you to be are;

Farmville (advertising)

World of Warcraft (subscriptions)

Almost any PC, PS3 or 360 game in existance (map packs etc)

Second Life (microtransactions)