[DaBrain]

PC Game companies are not losing tons of sales due to piracy, just like the music industry isn't.

Well... now that isn't right. The piracy does hurt the companies quite a lot, but there are some other factors.
Development costs are rising, but you can't simply make your games more expensive. There are too many games in the same genre.
You either have to have a huge budget, or your chances of creating a top-selling horror/action fps are less than slim.

And there is the game reselling, which might be the main target of DRM. At least that's my guess.
DRM didn't have any effect on the piracy, but reselling your game became harder and it's harder to lend your DRM-protected game to a friend.

Reselling = another person plays the game, without any profit for the company.

I think it's wrong to target this market. Makes gaming more/too complicated.

[blackhole]

Won't work. Reasons:
1. The BIOS is most definitely NOT read-only.
2. If i understand you correctly, this requires some form of remote activation by the game's producers; this could be problematic if those producers go bankrupt or decide to shut down the servers doing the activation.
3. DRM should never, EVER require me to register something online. I have no problems with keeping the game's disc in my drive in order to play, but needing an active internet connection to play a single-player game is just wrong.

Using the BIOS for any kind of DRM is stupid for a number of reasons. It's not read only, and it gets updated by the manufacturer periodically. The best bet is to use the CPU registry number or the MAC address, but even when using those it just doesn't work because the algorythm can always be cracked.

DRM is impossible because the information that is available to the game on the client's computer is all available to the cracker, therefore making it impossible to secure a game with anything other then roundabout coding tricks that just piss everyone off, as so lovingly demonstrated by the pathetic DRM attempts done by the industry.

The best thing I've come up with so far is the one CD-key online at a time, except if you want to go online, you attach a password to the CD-key itself when the key is being activated (so probably during the download process). This means that even if a hacker can generate a CD-key collision, that customer's game is effectively password protected. You could have the game save and hash the password to keep it safe and to reduce the annoyance factor to simply "enter in your password once" when you go to play multiplayer for the first time or after reloading your machine or something.

The downside being that, again, its online-based and that user accounts are then attached to their CD-key, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. This is why DRM should be limited to the multiplayer aspects of a game.

[kalnaren]

PC Game companies are not losing tons of sales due to piracy, just like the music industry isn't.

Well... now that isn't right. The piracy does hurt the companies quite a lot, but there are some other factors.
Development costs are rising, but you can't simply make your games more expensive. There are too many games in the same genre.

And there is the game reselling, which might be the main target of DRM. At least that's my guess.
DRM didn't have any effect on the piracy, but reselling your game became harder and it's harder to lend your DRM-protected game to a friend.

Reselling = another person plays the game, without any profit for the company.

I think it's wrong to target this market. Makes gaming more/too complicated.

Well, I never said piracy didn't hurt.. but it sure as hell isn't the single handed PC gaming market killer all the companies want you to think it is. Especially since the major game companies achieved record profits last year. They're not losing money.

Reselling PC software is illegal in most places. It's also been proven that second-hand game sales do not in fact hurt the gaming industry. DRM is also doing nothing to prevent this. If you have the legit disc and a legit key you have no issues. Also, companies like EA and Ubisoft have time and time again made the flat statement that they use DRM to combat illegal copying of a game.

You either have to have a huge budget, or your chances of creating a top-selling horror/action fps are less than slim.

Not really. Stardock is a perfect example of this. Granted, I wouldn't call the RTS genre as crowded as the FPS genre, but making a good RTS is significantly harder than making a good FPS.. and they did SoaSE on ~$900,000. Innovative, fluid, and fresh gameplay is what sells games. Not big budgets. If it was big budgets, every EA game would be a top seller.

Another thing I think that is a problem is companies (again, EA..) vastly overestimating their "projected sales" to please their shareholders. I don't have the exact numbers.. but EA said one of their problems with Spore was that it undersold by something like 5 million. They of course blamed it on piracy.... not the fact that expecting to sell 12 million copies of the game was completely ludicrous.

And the thing about using a computer's hardware to generate a key... that wont work for the simple reason that gamers frequently update our hardware.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

The CD key/password thing is a good idea (with the before mentioned problem of requiring internet connection).  Still it could be cracked.  It also has the downside of how many people can play with one CD key?  What if someone has 3 kids they want to be able to play?  Do they have to by three copies to get three passwords? 

[blackhole]

The CD key/password thing is a good idea (with the before mentioned problem of requiring internet connection).  Still it could be cracked.  It also has the downside of how many people can play with one CD key?  What if someone has 3 kids they want to be able to play?  Do they have to by three copies to get three passwords? 

Thats the problem with having only one CD-key online at a time, and while I would normally try and check to see if you can ping a computer on the LAN with the 192.168.x.x address, there's bound to be a way to mask that.  You could make it 3 people online at the same time with one CD-key/password.

The CD-key/password combo would be extremely difficult to crack with an MMO or other such central server that could reject players. In other cases you'd simply have a bunch of people with cracked versions playing with other people with cracked versions using a LAN like hamachi.

[Flaser]

Or just release the single player as a free download in the first place that way there is little overhead.  You pay your fee, you get your personal code, and you can play all the multi you want wherever you want. 

This again brigs up the problem with stolen codes.  Pretty sure Diablo II had the same problem.  A bunch of codes were activated before the games were even sold.  So you got the CD and couldn't play online until you got a new code.  Of course they weren't idiots about it like the EA spore fiasco.

...or God forbid make a demo!
...or even make the beginning of the game shareware.

Good Old Days of Gaming...ah, the memories!