A one time offline verification that is easily bypassed later and doesn't affect the game at all later... certainly...

A little annoying but that's about the only one i would accept still.

Yeah, discs suck for a variety of reasons too. I'm still buying movies on disc because if higher quality and no DRM, but it doesn't escape my notice that disc rot and player availability are concerns. The absolute best thing IMO is exactly what GOG does, DRM free downloads you can backup. Same thing most sites do for music. It's a shame such a thing doesn't exist for movies (legally) and is rarely used with newer "big" games.

Hitman and Hitman 2 can be played offline. You have to be online to do the challenges and get unlocks, but the core game works fine offline.

To answer the question posed in the thread title without mincing words: Negative!

Asterisk Yes.

There are technical forms of DRM I would accept, like what was found on many shareware programs.

The Architect: There are levels of survival that we are prepared to accept.

Yeah as a separate DLC or as a different edition IE. more expensive collector's

Inconvinient yes but sometimes they were part of the game and forced you to make something.

You actually made me recall when we used to hand deaw the layouts of the levels to keep our bearings and to avoid getting lost.
It was inconvinient, yes, but it was way more immersive and fun. I recall my brother playing Wolf3D and sketching the maps of the levels using different pens according to the colors of the walls and marking the secrets spots.

I still have somewhere the now-all-torn up-and-dull poster map we made for Privateer: screen-grabbed, composited, zoomed in and printed then put together with tape and gone over all the lines to cover the aliasing and making more nice and readable.

I mean yes today is infinetly more convenient but we've lost the joy and skill to to put at least some effort in things and make stuff and improvise.

PS. You need to take care of those eating habits of yours.

Disc rot only usually happens on cheaply made & improperly stored discs, and even then usually takes over a decade to occur. As for players, one can make ISOs and use those/skip using their discs(although one would have to get past that pesky moral dilemma of copying discs they paid for and also learn how to dump ISOs/disc images and use them).

But yeah, Gog is king in the digital installer(legal versions) club, I think.

Sounds good as long as one isn't a completionist, then. :)
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Do they involve using overly long and fancy sounding words? I bet they do. ;)
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This is what I was talking about for several posts(and got low rated for in post 41 by I guess lazy people?).....it was a bit of work to do such things but it was also a fun part of the experience for some people. Many today(in general, not focusing on anyone here) have it "too easy" in many regards, that they feel the need to complain about simplistic copy protections/making maps/tweaking install config files/etc.

Heck, there are nostalgia channels on YT where they use/fix old tech and talk warmly about configuring stuff(boot files/configs/etc)/running older installers/etc.

Sometimes I feel you are arguing just for argument's sake. Like here, your claim that all those code wheels and silhouettes in manuals etc. are super-easy to write down and copy... no they are not, no matter how many times you claim the opposite.

You see, the whole point of those manual checks etc. was that they are hard to copy, so that you couldn't give the codes to all your friends. If they were made easy to copy, then the whole DRM (manual check) would be kinda pointless, wouldn't it?

I argue to illustrate a point. Also, yes I don't know everything, but I am assuming it can be done with some work. As for claims...you seem to claim the other extreme, that it would likely take a near godlike effort needed to accomplish such, which seems a bit insane.

I was mainly talking about picture code wheels. They had a few boxes here and there. Copying them would just be as "easy" as lining up each combination and writing them down....those with symbols could use descriptions for each symbol in the listing of such and have a picture key scanned in attached to it.

Also now we have somewhat decent internet to transfer data and scanners to copy such physical items, so it's much easier to so such.
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One of the reasons I have kept at this, btw, is because you seemingly are dismissing the idea that such can be done/done with a bit of effort for most people. For most people(with small collections) this would be a trivial task....moreso if they shared their efforts to save time. Also not all games used code wheels/such schemes so one wouldn't have to do such for all games. It CAN be done, and that is the point I was trying to make.
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The worst form of DRM I would accept is a serial key that is typed in once at (or after) installation and which is not checked online.

Reason: What is important for me is game preservation. I want to be able to install and play the game many years from now if I want to replay it. So I don't accept any form of online checks since the servers can go down at any time.

DRM that people always manage to bypass, is basically useless. In the end, It's annoying for the customer, nobody else.

The appeal with GOG is I can install the game however, whenever and how many times on multiple computers I want without ____'s whim once I bought the game.

So, a sounding NO.

Not true....it often halts pirating for a few days, which is usually when said companies make a good chunk of their sales(same with other things, which see a good initial burst of interest at the start and then it tapers off dramatically in many cases). That is often good enough to justify DRM in the eyes of many greedy execs.

Most people here use Windows for GOG games. Windows (if used "legally") is DRMed. So they (the "legally" using ones at least) are "accepting" of DRMed software already? Depends what you mean with "accept". A serial number (which doesnt require online or anything of the sort) is probably not a "death sentence" to the odds of me buying the game but its a strong disadvantage for the publisher as I would be much less likely to do so than if it were DRM free.


Edit: serial number being offline

How bad must a game be that it only sells for a few days after release and then not much after that?