Ever willing to push the bar when it comes to new innovations in dispelling the sort of feelings traditionally associated with that activity known as gaming, publishers are going to great lengths to attach chains to legitimate purchases in the misguided (and overwhelmingly unsupported) notion that it will prevent piracy. Almost as terrifying to publishers as piracy is the used-game industry, and to this end more and more are including one-time use codes for significant pieces of content that are only available to second-hand buyers if they pony over twenty bucks for new keys. With this in mind, seemingly, Capcom has released a title for the Nintendo 3DS, Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D, which has its own innovative twist on the DRM schemes of yore: the cartridge contains a single saved game file which cannot be reset or deleted, locking the player to a single route of progression through the game.

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Last week, Yahoo!'s Plugged In site ran an interview with Epic Games' president Mike Capps detailing why his company has decided to leave the PC platform and switch focus to console games. Inevitably, his claim of rampant piracy has been picked up on a number of news sites and thrown up as validation that PC gaming is somehow "dying."

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Last week Wolfire Games announced the "Humble Indie Bundle," a collection of five popular indie games packaged together under one price. The enticing factor was that you could choose to pay whatever you wanted for the package. One might think the lack of DRM coupled with the ability to get a number of stellar games for as little as a penny would mitigate the need to pirate the collection. But on a blog post to their site, one of the co-founders of Wolfire Games posted numbers indicating that he believes around 25% of direct downloads of the bundle are pirated.

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A Hooked Gamers editorial published last week and making the blog rounds today makes the claim that Ubisoft's always-on DRM plan, which I've discussed here already, is actually pretty cool or something. Through a rambling escapade of analogies and references to electrical plugs on planes and the 360's common red-ring-of-death, in the end the final judgement is that Ubisoft's DRM is both progressive and "ahead of its time."

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Confirming their dedication to previous announcements, Ubisoft has recently said that the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 will utilize their latest attempt at DRM, necessitating an always-on internet connection for the duration of your game time. Rock Paper Shotgun says that this is "open contempt for paying customers" and, frankly, I agree with them.

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