Regarding switching to consoles to avoid DRM, the answer for me is, Yes.

Last year I switched to buying nearly all of my non-Indie games exclusivly on the XBox 360 to avoid DRM headaches (BioShock, Gears Of War, Fallout 3, ...).

I miss using my PC, but not so much that I'm willing to deal with DRM.

Note: I give a big "hoorah!" for indies who are willing to release DRM-free and I support them by buying their games whenever possible.
 

Unfortunately, indies are *still* getting ripped off horribly when they do this, so it doesn't solve the underlying problem.

I'm not necessarily opposed to DRM, but I see DRM as a very broad area as opposed to the rather narrow, draconian subset that has become the face of things. So we need a whole new acronym. And something that isn't so one-sided as to only benefit the publisher, and not protect the customer.

The silly thing is that I think publishers are completely failing to see what's really happening here. I mean, sure - most of the traffic from the PC to the console is probably not due to DRM rebellion. But it would be silly not to recognize that as a factor.
 

I have almost completely switched away from PC gaming in favor of console gaming because I don't have to worry about DRM, what OS the game will run on, drivers, how much memory the game will need to run, video card compatibility issues, free disk space, and hardware upgrades breaking older games.
 

A better form of DRM would be to uniquely identify each copy of the game/software so that it could be linked to the actual name/credit-card of the person who bought it. If you could fingerprint the software in such a way that it was impossible to change by just dumping extra rubbish into the executable for example, then you could track exactly who had been pirating what.

Make it exceptionally easy to run a pirate copy, no serial numbers, no CD cracks nothing. Just make sure each executable is completely unique and traceable and advertise to people that they should be careful who they lend their games to.
 

"A better form of DRM would be to uniquely identify each copy of the game/software so that it could be linked to the actual name/credit-card of the person who bought it. If you could fingerprint the software in such a way that it was impossible to change by just dumping extra rubbish into the executable for example, then you could track exactly who had been pirating what."

If the garbage is dumped somewhere obvious and predictable, it will be easily removed. If it's not, you're looking at some sort of code morphing. So instead of one SKU to deal with bugs in you're looking at an infinite number.

Go to thepiratebay and check our the nfo files and you'll see they're already happy to toss serial numbers of purchased copies into there. Uploading a "fingerprinted" copy won't deter them for a second.

Or for that matter, assuming this is a Real Evil Pirate, rather then someone giving a friend a copy of their game and going "this is good, you should play it", the Real Evil Pirate is already quite happy to break the law distributing the game, why not break another and use a stolen credit card?

And punishing a *customer* who gave you free advertising and more importantly a recommendation to a friend by giving them the game (granted an illegal act), seems completely counter to anything resembling good business sense.

But then again, DRM already punishes the *customer* not the pirate, so why am I expecting good business sense from the games industry?

If anything that should have been learnt from baen books (releasing their novels for free electronicly suddenly has people buying their author's back catalogue), independent music and such in the last decade, is that if people get product X you make for free, they're still often quite happy to purchase it from you if they like it as well! And/or they'll even buy other things from you too! [sarcasm]Amazing! Who would have thought making a product that doesn't suck would have people lining up to purchase it![/sarcasm]