What's up next, and thoughts on game security measures.

Just a quickie post about the upcoming reviews. I got Gran Turismo V a while ago but haven't had the time to get into it much until now so there's a review coming soon on that. Also, I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year edition on wednesday from steam at 75% discount, so thats next as well. Only got a few hours on Batman so far but I can easily see why it recieved such praise from the press, apart from the ridiculous Securom and Games for Windows Live stuff required to play the damn thing on the PC..

While on that train of thought, I was getting rather pissed off installing Batman and getting past the security to be able to actually play the game, I am curious what others think about these barriers of security even for strictly single player games?

My own take on it is that games that require you to be online, should actually have some online content in them. It is completely unacceptable that a 100% single player game requires continuous online connection to Steam/Games for Windows/Ubisoft etc. I can tolerate a one time authentication of your game version online, but that's it.  Also, as long as these security measures fail completely in the sense there are always stuff like cracked versions, no-cd executables and windows live disablers, these barriers against piracy are only really hurting the legitimate customers who has to cope with getting past them, sometimes getting faulty errors even in the process hindering them from enjoying the games they've bought.

From what I read on Steam forums, a lot of people who bought Arkham Asylum on wednesday recieved securom codes that didn't work. Supposedly fixed now, though and fortunately I didn't have this problem myself.

I did however have so much trouble getting Games for Windows Live set up for Arkham Asylum I felt royally screwed over, all the while I know there are very simple to use cracks that disable Games for Windows Live completely on some games (I used this for Fallout 3 myself just to get rid of the useless thing that actually made the game perform worse). When these systems serve only as intrusions and obstacles to overcome for paying customers, and all of these systems are so easily bypassed just doing a quick google search, why do we have them ? Because it feels like they are just here to make their customers miserable!