What does "no DRM" mean?

PA wont have DRM, right?

Does that mean, it is legal to distribute the game to friends, so that they can play it in singleplayer? or is it still illegal, but there is no technical barrier that stops me from doing it? just wondering...

Installing the game without a license is illegal. No DRM means no activation or other such attempts at enforcing this (which are usually detrimental to legitimate users, especially when they falsely detect a legal copy as illegal).

If it's on Steam (which I assume it will be) it will have Steam's DRM anyway.

Steam only needs you to activate the game. Beyond that you can play it offline.

It will also be on Steam. Uber seems to be quite capable of distributing this game themselves, but Steam might bring out even more. Hell, it could also be on GamersGate or Impulse or whatever the other digital distribution services are.

But it will only have Steam's DRM, if the game uses Steamworks, which I doubt it will, because the game is not intended to be restricted to Steam.

No DRM means you can do with it whatever either your home country's fair use laws permit or whatever you can get away with. (e.g. Let your little brother play with your copy, put it on your laptops, run two instances of the same game in a LAN match, make a really awesome mod, etc)

Under no circumstances does no DRM equal Permission to Freely Distribute.

Ask yourself this question: If I leave the front door unlocked when I leave the house, does that still make it legal to rob it?

i guess even enter, is questionable ;D

The idea is: You don't lock your door because it would make it legal to rob your house, if you did not, but because thieves are unlikely to care whether it is legal or not.

But that is a far as the comparison between a lock on your front door and DRM goes. Because a front door lock doesn't have to communicate back to its maker and sometimes locks up because it believes to be a thief despite having the key available.

if I know correctly it is legal in germany to copy DRM free music CDs for friends and family up to 5 times or something like that. I dont know if its the same for pc games though^^

Yeah, at that point the analogy breaks down in weird ways, because I don't think anyone "licenses" a house. Now, if you're a renter...

No, you have to be online to play the game. If your internet is shot for whatever reason, you can't login to steam in the first place to play the game. There have also been times for me when I don't have any internet problems, I try to launch a game, and steam says "sorry, this game is currently unavailable, please try again later." I thought what? The game is on my hard drive, I'm sure it's available. :x You can crack the game to make it so you don't have to go onto to steam to play it.

if UberNet is used instead of steamworks, steam will also launch the game in offline mode, and you connect to UberNet independently.

Steam has an offline modus that makes it possible to use steam-games without any internetconnection.
There have been a few occasion on which this modus was bugged though, resulting in people not being able to log in. That is however not the desired behavior. Bugs happen.

I have no problem with steam's DRM scheme.

Which is why I roll my eyes when people deride UPlay / Origin. Nobody has a problem with a DRM scheme that requires you to install a third-party store that, by default, has pop-ups trying to sell you garbage, but as soon as ANYONE ELSE has an always-on internet authentication DRM scheme, oh suddenly it's a big problem.

Gamers are a bunch of whining moron pricks with huge double-standards who will bad-mouth every company the second they do anything even remotely off-key, but will march lockstep with Valve and Blizzard right off a goddamn cliff like the blind retards they are.

Yeah, every game on your Steam account can be, at Valve's discretion, completely deleted. If someone wants to take my copy of Sins of a Solar Empire they'd have to kick down my door and take it. But 99.9% of gamers are happy to have it only a single press of the delete key away from being taken altogether.

But DRM is "bad". lol, just.... lol.

If you actually used that shop to buy the game it is a different story. Plus Steam is damn convenient, given a fast internet connection. UPlay and Origin are (or were, dunno how much Origin was patched) both either buggy or enforce DRM-concepts (always online for Singleplayer) that are worse than what Steam uses. A correctly working steam-installation will let you play offline without any problems.

Except Origin has an offline mode which is how I played Dead Space 2. But people deride it as 'intrusive'. Pray tell how is it more intrusive than Steam? How is it any worse than the massive pile of buggy, half-assed resource-hogging **** that Steam was for the first three years of its life, that required you to delete clientregistry.blob on a monthly basis because it would suddenly decide to lock your download rate at 200KB/s for no explicable reason? I love when I press ctrl-alt-del and see Steam is using 600+ MB of RAM... and why? Who the hell knows! But Origin with its constant 40MB is 'worse'? HAH.

This is the client made by a company that has more money than the Catholic Church which has said it would include a download speed limiter over two years ago and has yet to deliver.

This is the client made by a company that has more than enough resources to provide something as convenient as a download time scheduler to work around 95% of the world that has fair-use limitations on internet, but can't despite the fact that everyone who uses Steam has probably shoveled hundreds of dollars into them.

But every time I bring that up, the excuses start flowing. "Oh, well it's your job to start downloads when you can." "Oh if you don't want your games to rob you of 6GB of monthly bandwidth because of an unforseen update, it's your job to stop the download."

Steam is a god damn joke, but please, keep making excuses for why Valve, the company that has made more useless pay-for addons than it has actual games, is a glorious company that cares about gamers.

Many Steam games can be run independently of Steam. And given that Steam is only one of the distribution platforms that will carry PA, it surely won't require an active connection with Steam to run.

We'll have offline play. They've made that clear.

Just saying, Steam is good because it is a Walmart of games.

That being said, Steam and Walmart are terrible too.

At the end of the day, most of us will pay for the convinence, rather than spend time and money to avoid using them because we were robbed 5 dollars. It costs more in gas to go to Home Depo and then Kroger, than it does to just let Walmart rob you. So says a Walmart employee.

I will stick to Steam. I am glad it unified the ways all gamers get their games, in the way XFire hoped to long ago.