That's still an incredible minority of the gaming populace to have no connection to the Internet at their primary gaming machine. Even a simple dialup connection would suffice.

Developers who want to use GOO or whatever Valve released will simply accept that this minority will not be able to play their games.

For activating, yes. But for downloading 2 Gigas of data, this is another thing.

Again, if you're making your game available for download only, you're accepting that only people with internet connections that can download your game will be able to play it.

For store-bought games, GOO/Valve equivalent only need a one-time activation. A dialup connection is all they need, and they only need it once. From there, you can just copy the game from place to place.

Compare this to, for example, SecureROM. Not only do you need an internet connection anytime you want to run the game, but you're limited in the number of activations you get too.

It depends about the delivery method. It could be a downloadable installer than can be copied to an USB drive.

Most of the game run good when you dissable the heuristic anti virus... more, windows have so much security hole that before Stardock use Impulse, i was always upgrading my games via  Linux ( Stardock central waqs working on Linux )...

Before Sins, my windows OS was never allowed to connect to the internet... 20 years of computer knowledge and monthly reinstall of windows was the lesson... on my work, computer are using windows but the server who connect to the externe world are using Linux for security reason... ( Linux is not the best, Unix is better )...

Don't read me wrong... i like windows ( Vista is better and i have a lot of hope in Windows 7 )... but it is a good system that I don't trust when internet connection is needed... to much risk...

About people not having a internet connection, they are not a minority but a majority... almost all people from Africa, almost all people of China, the majority of Russian ( unless you life in a big city )... this together is already more that the half of the world population !!!

In the Linux world, Ubuntu/Kubuntu are one of the top distro... Do you know why ? Not because they are beter that other distro but because they have the ship-it thing... not internet connection, you receive the CD via post !!!

I know... African, Chinesse, and Russian people are poor... but what is the best business solution : earn 100 time 10$ or earn 10000 time 1$ ?

The real thing is to see if Stardock target the short term ( a lot of money now ) or the long term ( 100 time a lot of money in a periode of 10 year )... i understand ( but not accept ) the actual strategy of Stardock... they are a minor player in the business now, they need all money now for survive tomorrow... it is not really a Stardock problem but more a problem of rich people who invest in Stardock who wish a fast return... long term investering is really what hurt the quality game distributor now... Stardock is not really responsible because they don't control everything... but being a usual user, i complain against them ( because i cannot complain against people who have invest in Stardock )

Stardock has no outside investors. Only current for former employees have any stock or stock options in the company.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make actually.

A person who buys GalCiv or Sins or Demigod at the store doesn't need an Internet connection at all to play the game. There's no copy protection, no DRM, no disk check.

However, if they want to get updates, they obviously have to get them off the Internet and all our games have always required a user to create some sort of account with us with their serial # so that we can verify that they're a customer before providing them updates.  The creation of that account, known as activation, has worked pretty extremely well.

I have a GOO question that deals with multi-platform games.

I'm sitting here with a PC copy of Call of Duty 4. If I wanted to play CoD4 with my friends on Xbox Live; I'd have to fork over another 60$ for the Xbox 360 version.

Could GOO alleviate this issue in the future by allowing me to buy one game license I can transfer between platforms?

This is impressive, of cousre I'm sure it'll be cracked quickly like all other modes of DRM, but the time, effort and risk to your hardware wouldn't be worth it.

Overall, this seems like a great help to Developers while greatly limiting the burden to players, of course I'd have to get my hands on a GOO protected game first to make the call at how friendly it is, but seriously there is nowhere to go but forward with current DRM protection on games.  And sadly it is a nescessity for the developers to protect their hard work since less reputable characters have no qualms about stealing software.  I guess since you don't have to walk out of a store with it? (in most cases, lol)

Risk to my HARDWARE? How?

Well, putting small items in bigger packaging DOES avert shoplifters (because it's trickier to hide it). It's the same with piracy. If it's TOO easy, more people will do it. The trick is to make any DRM as transparent to honest customers as possible. I like the "fire and forget" feel of this scheme.

But very few publishers are convinced of that. It is for them that GOO has been made.

Exactly.

On Stardock games you buy at retail, we put nothing on it.  There's no copy protection. No DRM, nothing.  The idea there is that there are plenty of people who don't have Internet connections.  

People should be able to go to the store, buy their game, take it home, install it and not have to worry.

But...

If they want to get updates, well obviously we need to make sure the person actually bought the game. Otherwise, we have to jump through all kinds of hoops to make sure (for one example) that the "patch" doesn't turn a demo version into a full game (there have been plenty of debacles in gaming history like that).

Now, what Goo does is take what we've been doing for years and let third parties use it.  In Demigod or GalCiv or WindowBlinds, we had to insert code into the source of the program to support this. Obviously, third parties aren't going to want to do that.  So instead, we automate this with Goo. (i.e. run Goo.exe on the game).

Will it get cracked? Certainly. Everything can be cracked. The difference here is that what we do is invisible. I doubt the average Demigod beta tester even knew their game was "Goo'd" for the past 6 months. It's basically invisible.  Same for GalCiv users.

Err, nearly every major company keeps internet records of everything that happens.  Steam, Games For Windows and many other programs are very likely doing the exact same, if not more.