You install 1 GB+ of files to your hard disc and still have to have the CD to run it.
Worst offender in this category is Dawn of War Soulstorm. Every other Dawn of War game had either no CD in drive requirements (Dark Crusade) or it was removed early on in a patch. This is wonderful for people who travel a lot and don't don't fancy dragging their entire video game collection along with them, because they want to play a quick game. CD-Keys are slightly more effective than you think. Granted they are useless for single-player or LAN (where you can get new ones) but playing online you need different keys and known-pirated ones are blocked.
Oh yes. Very effective. Chalk another one up for Dawn of War Soulstorm, which refuses to acknowledge the CD keys for my other Dawn of War games (you need them to unlock the other races in multiplayer), which basically leaves me to play the two races in multiplayer that are broken. So that's £100 extra for EA, I guess.
Yeah? Well it's another £x less for THQ, where x represents the price of any games they release in the future on the PC that I might have otherwise bought. Seriously if Spore won't run on my PC then Soulstorm will be the last PC game I buy. If Spore will run on my PC, it'll be the second last. I'm so tired of putting up with this stupid bullshit. I like copy protection which actually helps the legitimate players instead of hindering them.
Yeah, or Total Gaming. It's a shame Stardock don't get more games I like. The amount of work that went into Windows is probably 1,000 times greater than the amount of work invested in Blitzmax
No offense but you do not measure the "worth" of something in amount of man-hours used to create it. If there is no compelling reason to buy Windows it isn't worth anything, regardless of how much it cost to make. Furthermore the cost to make Windows is not a factor in it's retail price. Windows costs what people are willing to pay for it. That's why there are so many different versions of it, all priced differently.