[QUOTE="Makari"][QUOTE="Ein-7919"]Two recent games that came out that (surprisingly) didn't need the disc to run (right out of the box) are Spore and Red Alert 3. I say surprisingly because both games were published by EA...and EA had a nasty track record of draconian forms of DRM.Ein-7919
It's actually a bit the opposite - EA was the last to the party on SecuROM, as Take 2, Ubisoft, THQ, etc had already been using the exact same stuff for a while when EA picked it up. It went back to at least Company of Heroes in 2006. Before then, EA largely used Safedisc w/ disc check that nobody really cares about, and is what Activision used 90% of the time IIRC. In addition, the 'draconian DRM' that they caught flak for was the very same reason Spore and RA3 didn't require the disc in the drive, in your case. :DVery true...but the case I was aiming for was Mass Effect. Prior to the community back-lash, the phoning home service to allow users another ten days of game play was probably the strictest form of DRM I had heard of. Granted, the DRM was scaled back after people discovered that 'feature', but the image was burned into people's minds that EA was one of the worst adopters of DRM. This image wasn't helped any with the pop-up window the would appear if you ran out of installs for Spore (the 'please purchase another registration code, reinstall, and then try again' message). While EA did respond to this message as an error, it still sticks in people's minds.
However, with all that said, I did find it kind of surprising that EA went back to the disc check method for The Sims 3 (although, that could be because you need to have a valid serial key in order to access the Sim Store)...
It was actually ten days of no checks, followed by ten days of 'countdown' + checking before it'd lock you out of the game. A bit more than 20 days offline - at the time, they were aiming to copy Steam's time frame exactly, which would let you stay in 'offline' mode for ~25 days at a time before Steam would lock you out of the game. After the giant mess that started, Steam preemptively fixed that before people noticed. In most part, it was a case of people on the forums making things up and making it sound a lot worse than it was. Ditto for the popup message, in a way. Bioware/EA responded to it pretty much immediately, saying it was a mistake and that they had fixed it... IIRC the same day or the day after at most. However, people on this forum kept running around quoting old stories and leaving out the corrections that were posted even months after it had been officially acknowledged and fixed within 24 hours. I remember that one very well, heh. They went back to disc checks cause it's what people said they wanted, basically. The decision-makers really have no idea what it is the community as a whole wants - they attempted to copy Steam, and were honestly likely completely surprised by the backlash. The community pretty much complains no matter what they do and goes out of their way to ignore when something that is a 'problem' was corrected or dealt with well, so there isn't much feedback for them on what actually works vs. what doesn't. 
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