LogFAQs > #939602780

I mean, physical media is itself a sort of DRM. If you don't have it, no game for you. A few publishers released their own no-CD patches, often for the purpose of facilitating LAN play (Starcraft comes immediately to mind), but the standard was usually to not let people play a game unless they possessed a copy of it. In many ways, DRM for digital games seeks to emulate that, since without it, a single purchased copy can potentially be played by any number of people. It very often ends up being needlessly restrictive in its efforts to achieve that, including eliminating second-hand ownership and interfering with people's ability to play games they have purchased, and when that happens it's worse than the limitations inherent in physical media, but it's very much not the case that we've ever had no restrictions on our ability to play games. Those restrictions just used to come from basic physical reality instead of a publisher's rules.

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