[frightlever]

To quote myself "I think people willing to pay will pay and those who can't, or won't, won't pay no matter what." which just agrees with you that copy protection or lack therof hasn't got a bearing on whether a game will sell. If you're going to buy it you'll buy it. If you're not then there are plenty of excuses to make to yourself why not.

I'm amazed at the way forums have been taken over by anti-Starforce sentiment in the last year or so. There are plenty of good reasons why I may not buy Space Empires 5 but copy protection definitely isn't one of them. I'll likely pre-order a physical copy and then crack on release day and buy the download too. I ended up buying 3 copies of Silent Storm because I liked it so much I just wanted to spread the word.

As for Steam, which I never really touched on, if you want to play a MP game you need to validate through Steam but if you're playing a MP game you're probably either already on the Internet or on a LAN and if you're on a LAN in the 21st century I can't believe there are too many times you won't have some Internet access.

Again I want to stress I'd prefer it wasn't the case but OTOH I'm not that worried about it. Your life must be pretty sweet if you consider this a hardship. Running a house and holding down a job (to spend on food and games) give me more than enough grief for me to worry about copy-protection.