[quote="Mosfet"][quote="PlutonianEmpire"][post]25508[/post] Why exactly would non-steam releases require DRM protection? Some obscure copyright law that everybody hates?[/quote]
I'm curious, how many copies of the program do you think will be sold if there is no copy protection? I mean, before it lands on everyone's computer for free.[/quote]
Ask CD Projekt RED about sales of their DRM free singleplayer game you may heard of. World has changed. I remember we had quite a big piracy problem in Poland in the past, but it was when gamers/PC users were kids. Now gamers are parents.

It's no longer "dumb" to "waste money" on "stupid games". People buy stuff if they can afford it.
I'm not SpaceEngineer, but if I were him, I would also consider another aspect - educating young generation. There are a lot of kids who can't afford it and simply won't buy it. There are still some poor parents that wouldn't buy SE for their kid thinking of it as a game... While watching dumb TV shows whole evening. SE is educational and can really influence kids and make them interested in space exploration and astronomy, so even if less copies were sold, more people would know about SE and get interested in things that are important to our near future. I don't think piracy would be an issue in case of SE though, this is a software that mostly intelligent people are interested in. Intelligence alone seems to be related to piracy, as this article suggests:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... are_piracyIf on top of that you add what kind of intelligent people are interested in SE, it gets only better. I can see a correlation between being interested in Space stuff and caring for our future. People who like SE would generally want it to succeed as it spreads the important knowledge that our society generally doesn't have (people tend to care more about gossips and news about who offended who). More interest in Space related stuff means more money for public Space Agencies and more private ones. I don't think you can compare an average GTA player to an average Space Engine user if we talk about which of these groups care more about developer getting money for their work.

Aaaand there's the fact that no DRM is uncrackable.
I really hope SpaceEngineer does good research before deciding on DRM. If according to calculations DRM greatly increases income then sure, do it, I'm buying anyway. But if it looks like not much difference, then maybe it's better to make SE more popular among kids from poor families (which are most likely simple conservative people with a never-read Bible on a shelf).