Where is your DRM now.

I am monitoring piracy channels. Firstly to get access to untainted versions of games I buy. (I happen to live in Germany). Secondly because I am interested in the subject, especially in respect to DRM. Once again I noticed the complete failure of DRM. The DRM for Bulletstorm was cracked the day it was released in the US. This is 2 days before the release here in Germany.

When you listen to pundits defending DRM, they often say that DRM is there to at least prevent piracy in the first weeks following the release. But this seldom seems the case. Many games see zero day cracks. Additionally, it seems that most people intent on pirating the game will just wait out the few weeks until the game is cracked, thus this argument is moot.

What bothers me even more is that Bulletstorm has quite a comprehensive DRM scheme with online activation and all. (As far I have read, my copy won't ship till tomorrow.) All that effort was put into developing the DRM, deploying the infrastructure, running the infrastructure and all for nothing.

I read somewhere that publishers calm their stock holders, by explaining that they are combating piracy and one of the means is DRM. In my opinion implementing a non trivial DRM scheme is simply wasting money.

Do we really need DRM like that?