Re: Another mole is whacked with a rubber mallet...
I remember those days - I was a not-so-spotty teenager hammering away on my Amiga. I do seem to remember, too, that I didn't own much in the way of "retail copies" of games back then. The ones I did own, I actually *OWNED*. Now, you don't own a game, the company grants you permission to use the game.
I don't agree with the whole DRM thing, but I fail to see an alternative. One of the biggest problems is that the people who "vote with their wallets" in regards to DRM are quite often more than happy to pirate the game. Phrases like "If they're going to treat me like a criminal after I bought the game" are happily connected with the phrase "I'll just go download the cracked version whe it comes out.", and nobody seems at all willing to acknowledge the hypocrisy of this behavior.
Personally, I take the stance that if I want to play the game badly enough, I will suffer with the DRM. I have many many games which I have had to bin because I didn't want to use a crack to bypass CD protections that didn't work under modern operating systems. I could build and maintain a legacy box, but I already have 3 desktop PCs and a laptop to deal with. Some of them, like Earth 2160, I had to bin because the activation servers were taken down (nobody could possibly still want to play this, right?).
There's no way I believe that SimCity (or any of my games which use Uplay) are going to be playable in 5 years. Even 3 would be a stretch. The point is to get the most out of them while you can, not worry that sometime down the road, you'll have a hankering to play some more and it won't be able to authenticate. That's even a concern with my PS3, but I'm not just going to stop buying games (and DLC for those games) just because they might go away.