I completly agree with the first post of the topic. With one exception. It may have been taken an week for the crackers to crack the first DRM game but Spore was avialable on torrents on the next day after its realease. With a fully working crack.

I don't see why companies like EA keeps trying to do such dumb things like DRM. It seems they don't know anything about pirates.

PIRATES are people which don't care much whether they will play the game online or not. Since the dawn of games requiring an original CD key was enough to stop people from playing online and force people which want to enjoy the game online to actually buy it. PIRATES don't care if the game has 132423432 tools which stops them from playing the game online as they don't do it because the original key have stopped them from doing so a long time ago. All this protection tools do is harming their actual customers as they cannot enjoy freely their online content and cutting their own sales. Also... Mostly pirates aren't people which don't want to buy the game. They are people which can't buy it.Kids, teens, people from poor countires and so on. Putting anti piracy tools won't make them buy the game. In case of SPORE the only thing they should have done is to require your original CD-KEY when you register your account to browse the online content. Nothing more.

The hardware and software industry are connected. When a programmer writes a software he usually tries to use what is avialable to him as an hardware. With faster PC and GPU you can try to implement more realistic physics and better AI for example. But the biggest reason is that it is easier to write something unoptimized and rely on that that the user will have great PC :). Also many software and hardware giants are connected and they are increasing the requirments of the software so you can buy new hardware and vice vecra. I suck at explaining so i hope you got something.

Also you new games are a lot more complicated then older ones as the new gamers likes shiny graphics, realistic physics and so on. And usually the vision is what sales a game.