Ok... to be fair the only problem I've had with a gamersgate game is when the drm server is down, which of course sends the customer support guys on a wild goose chase because by the time they get my e-mail the DRM server is back up. But the basic problem with DRM, if were explaining to a pure business guy is a 6 - Sigma problem. To the rest of us: defects cost money, and DRM, any DRM, is a source of defects. Which robs your company of profit when 'doing your best to help', and the annoyance robs you of paying customers. I'm sure you're doing your best to gauge the relative costs to you vs the projected increase in revenue due to reduced piracy, but I'm betting it's a calculation doomed to failure.
on the costs side you have to buy or develop the DRM for a product. Then constantly test and update it. You have to keep servers up, train support staff in DRM related errors and then deal with the extra support costs because DRM causes defects.
On the benefits side you might sell more copies, assuming that 2 days after release a naive search for 'product name' + torrent didn't turn up what appear to be complete versions of the game - versions of the game which presumably do not have the defect of DRM on them, and are therefore less likely to experience errors overall. Much as microsoft would love to suggest the risks of worms etc in pirated software the rather public vetting process that picks out the desired version of a pirated product seems to be not much worse than any other download on the internet, legal or otherwise. At least I can download it from gamersgate rather than have to wait for a boxed copy to show up (if it ever will) at my local retailer who now only wants to stock DRM box (console) games.
I have a strong, dreadful feeling DRM related defects (as with any defects) drive away customers, who then, either swear off paying for your products or spend the money and buy DRM boxes (360/PS3/Wii). The whole notion of a worldwide release of a boxed product was always destined to failure, and gamersgate is (along with its competitors) is a fantastic change, if I could just get rid my ISP's download limits... The console solution certainly kills two birds with one stone (common technical environment and hardware DRM), but then, somewhat ironically, doesn't benefit from the advantages of piracy exposing your product to people who will pay for 'product name 2: now with subtitle!' or the other obvious advantages of memory and interface.
The notion of binding a product to an account (like gamersgate and steam etc.) and therefore having no 'number on activations' is good, but its masking the problem, admittedly if we could get Microsoft to do the same thing with their product keys there would be dancing in the streets but the bar is set differently for them. You have people whose product doesn't work, and you're taking developers who could be making sellable products and trying to figure out where in the chain of DRM activation the problem could be, assuming it's actually a DRM problem, it could be a network/server load problem, an improper registry entry or some actual technical problem with the product purchased. Here, the obvious first step in support is to verify it is a DRM problem, and to do that you try it without DRM and see if that fixes it, which in a depressingly circular fashion lands back at piracy. If that does fix it, well... why would a customer care about you fixing the torn shrink wrap on his CD now that it's opened and playing in his player? If that doesn't fix it, then you can figure out if maybe it's a bug in the installer or the like (in my entirely anecdotal case none of the shortcuts created by the installer worked correctly in Windows 7 RC-64bit, but the actual executables do. Trying to start via the shortcuts gets a 'there was a problem with your installation please reinstall' error, which looks suspiciously like it's a DRM issue, but isn't. I think it just isn't setting the working directories properly). I suppose you could require people to login to their gamersgate account to play any gamergate games, and only allow a userid to have one active login (and time out inactive sessions after 15 minutes or something), but I can't imagine that being popular with non MMO games.
