jamyskis: I would quite happily place more trust in my €19 Ikea Kilby bookshelf, a CD and an Amaray box than I would a profit-driven server operator. This "physical media is obsolete because CDs get scratched/broken etc." argument is desparate - it's wearing thin and getting old.

CDs - at least properly pressed and properly cared-for ones - are expected to last between 30 and 100 years. Obviously, nobody can tell if they'll actually last 100 years, but there are music CDs from the mid-1980s still in circulation that still play perfectly.

The only people I ever see claiming that their CDs and DVDs have somehow rotted through no fault of their own are the people trying to drive home some ideological point about physical media being dead. And when I've seen such degradation, there has always been some underlying cause - games left out of their boxes in the sun, kids handling the games unchecked, a complete lack of discipline when handling the games with discs lying about on carpets, rugs, dirty tables and so on.

In fact, I actually used to think that magnetic media were the exception when it came to game media preservation, and that they degraded somewhat more quickly. Even there I've been proven wrong - I've just received a whole bunch of 1980s C64 games on 5.25" disc, and all of them bar one work perfectly.

timppu: I bolded the important word in your sentence. It is you, not the publisher. The DRM example would be the publisher coming to your home to scratch your disk (deliberately or not) so that you can't use the game any more.

timppu: Debatable, because the publisher can't retroactively change the lifespan, like coming to your home to scratch the disc if they feel you shouldn't be allowed to use (install and/or play) it anymore.

Also considering the rather long lifespan of CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs, I don't consider it plausible that the game publishers see that as the point to use copy protection (ie. that you can play the game only for a limited time). But in a broader sense, copy protection has same purpose as (online) DRM, ie. some level of control to the publisher over how people use their license. But with online DRM, the publisher can also change the restrictions afterwards.

timppu: Wait a minute. Were you talking about a retail game which you have to activate online (e.g. limited activations)? Then I misunderstood, I thought you were talking about offline copy protection with no online activation required (even at the installation time).