Been testing the demo version of Anno 1404, since I'm below the minimum requirements. Worked fine apart from some sound glitches. Maybe larger Cities will crumble my frame rate but oh well. I will get a fast laptop sometime in the near future anyway. And it reminded me a lot of the first Anno I played.

Since I accidentally got a DRM infested version of Oblivion, for $$$, I do check before buying a game now. To Bethesda defence they did not use freaking activations.

To bad for Ubisoft, they are using TAGES which does not sound like something I would like to use. Google for it and see some of their problems from the last holiday season (servers down 2+ days) and ubisoft is allegedly having bad customer service concerning older DRM titles as claimed by users on the steam forums or cd drive problems in X3TC (yeah I read anno does not use cd validation).

I do not oppose DRM completely as long as they are sane.

As you might have read, on twitter, I bought The Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition on Steam. I wont be able to pass my copy to a friend or family member after I finished the title, as I did when I was a minor and played Monkey Island the first time. Plus I do not have a nice coaster sitting in my bookshelf after finishing the game.

But steam proved itself of being trustworthy and non intrusive, imho (and Monkey Island is only 10 Euros). Same scheme as iTunes after-all.

On iTunes I bought TV episodes that also bound to my account but are cheaper then the DVD and also available in English. Yet I would not buy non iTunes-Plus music since I can't copy it to my linux or if ever I buy a non apple portable music player.

Egosoft with X3 uses stupid DRM too, but they are trustworthy to provide lots of patches that also contain free updates and after awhile they remove the DRM from the game. One might just wait for the DRM free 2.0 version, if you hate DRM that much. All hail to egosoft. Seriously I like you guys.

That said I'm none of this automatic no-sayers, still I do not like to be fucked with for spending good money on a poor product (non sane DRM, whatsoever). You could at least have a non TAGES steam version. I might have considered buying that.

Well maybe they patch it out or I make up my mind. Until then I got plenty of other games, SimCity4, CivIV,... and maybe pick it for $ instead of $$$ price tag without three online activations later next year.