Depends. If he waits until a used copy shows up on the shelf of his gaming store and buys that, the publisher doesn't get a penny, and he still gets his game (which he can then use a cracked executable to run).

then the only people getting the money, is the game store and not the developers.

Whatever. I have it on 360 anyway.

That's the whole point: as long as I have an alternative that still supports to some extent the design studio/production team/game company (whatever you want to call it) I have no concern about the DRM situation.
I use and love Steam which is a DRM platform, I play some DRM games because it's not as restrictive as other implementations and I will buy World of Goo off of Steam instead of from their website not because I don't want to support 2DBoy directly or because I like DRM but because I find Steam to be a great platform, it suits my needs (even offline play works for me for some reason) and because I can both support the developer and a content distribution platform that, even DRM enabled, still holds true to some basic principles I like.
Sorry if I haven't made much sense but it's 4AM over here and I'm working like mad on a project.
Also: xkcd - Sleet

So? If I don't agree with their decision to require all of that garbage, why would I want to give them my money?
And why is it that only game companies whine about not seeing money from used sales, anyway? I've never heard car manufacturers complaining that they don't get any money when I sell my car used to someone else, or even the normally sue-crazy record labels trying to get cash for used CD sales. Why do game companies have the arrogance to believe they should be given some 'special consideration;'? (Just to note, this second screed isn't so much directed at Weclock as just a rant at game companies).

Will this hurt the gaming industry overall? Cos I'm beginning to do this more often now.

Right, another one off my list. Actually, to be fair, this one was not on it to start with, I preferred the 2(.5)D top down games.
I go that one step extra and skip the purchase and ignore it from here on.
(Though admittedly, I should voice this to the company (which will probably ignore me anyway)
Save the money for some tasty noodles, a summer event BBQ with friends and places like GOG.

The difficulty is that they try to keep track of the downloads of cracked versions and those numbers can be skewed from people who bought the game, but also download the cracked version so they don't have to deal with the DRM. So, they do get their money, but they can still cry "Foul," when the download numbers are high, pirates or not. In that case, it might still hurt the industry, because developers might use this as an excuse to put in worse DRM or completely walk away from the PC. On the other hand, if a consumer has already bought the game and its DRM messes up their computer or makes the game unplayable, what other choice do they have?

Its that lack of choice that makes me feel oppressed. I want someone to stand up for us PC gamers and make it the platform I knew and loved back in the good old days.

You didn't have any choice even back then; the thing is that the industry evolved, and as larger and larger sums of money get invested and expected to be returned 'evil overlords' appear. Look at it like the movie industry: how many studios do we have now that can produce AAA titles? That's what's going to happen to the gaming industry.

Well, the now 4 (and counting) class action lawsuits in the system against EA over SecuROM could just fit the bill. I guess some of the lawyers are also sniffing around the idea of maybe launching a massive suit against Ubi, Sony, EA, Bethesda, Take 2, Midway, Atari, etc., etc. for the same reason. A successful lawsuit against Ubi is what finally forced game devs to drop Starforce...a successful lawsuit over hidden install DRM in general would legally force a simliar change.

BRB FORMATTING

A blog post on the horrors of GTA 4.
What I don't get is how they can screw up so badly if they delayed the game more than half a year? Did everyone in QA say "yeah, this works perfectly now", and somehow missed the arduous installation process and horrible optimization?

DRM is one of the reasons I won't buy GTA IV. And any other recent and future game with problematic DRM stuff (didn't bioshock, wont buy crysis, farcry 2, etc).
A serial key and or cd check I can still accept anything other than that, tough luck. It's their loss, my gain ( i will save a fortune in not buying games, and who will probably will gain my money diverted from there? GOG)

figured everyone would get a kick out of this. Here are the hoops I have to jump through to load up gta4 properly from the steam version:
*Load up the rockstar social club program and login.
*Create a desktop shortcurt with the -norestriction flag
*Run the game with this shortcut
*As soon as the game loads up full screen, alt-tab over to the social club and log out and click skip login once the login screen reappears
*alt-tab back to the GTA4 game and wait until it hits the main menu
*alt-tab back to the social club and login
*alt-tab back into the game and login to GFWL and done!
nice and easy :) thank you rockstar!