Quote Originally Posted by TonyTheTiger View Post
I respect people standing up for what they believe in and I'd make the exact same decision regarding that gas station. And I think your fears about modern interconnectivity are not entirely foil hat worthy. The PS3 situation and Ubisoft's "must be online to play but, oops, our servers are down" issue do show that there's a gradual shift in how digital media works. So I perfectly understand that the trend is off putting.

I don't, however, necessarily think this is going to be a continuous downward spiral. The reason we're in this situation is because we're in a transitional period. Transitional periods are often characterized by a fair bit of anarchy since the law and regulatory infrastructure (even as basic as the court of public opinion) haven't caught up yet. We still don't know the full legal power of EULAs or whether or not certain forms of DRM are legitimate. The realm of "internet law" and the implications of the DMCA haven't been extensively tested in the courts and it's still too early for the market to respond with any definitive "No, that's going too far." Remember that it's only this generation that software patches and BIOS updates have become the norm for console gaming. I think we need to wait out the storm before we start assessing the damage.
I would strongly disagree with you that internet law and DMCA have anything to do with whether or not publishers will continue to push for new means through which they can profit from or eliminate the used game market. Even if the supreme court comes back in a case and rules that consumers have the right to freely sell and transfer digital content (which is very, very unlikely), I can't imagine any legal basis for forcing publishers to maintain game servers at their own expense for the benefit of used game purchasers. We are well out of the transitional period and with the dominance of iTunes and other digital content systems already destroying the previous record company sales model and download services already gaining a significant percentage of market share on the PC side, it is only a matter of time until more and more companies adopt the EA model. Personally, I don't blame them and I fully understand the business reasons for doing so. As a collector, it raises concerns, however, as it is not really possible anymore to collect the "entire" game in this era of day-one DLC, server based gaming, etc...