Steam "makes DRM obsolete" ... with more DRM!

Steam claims to have made DRM obsolete ... with more DRM!

Valve today announced a new set of advanced features delivered in Steamworks, a complete suite of publishing and development tools that are available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.

Headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology that compliments the already existing anti-piracy solution offered in Steamworks. A customer friendly approach to anti-piracy, CEG makes unique copies of games for each user allowing them to access the application on multiple machines without install limits and without having to install root kits on their PC.

Sure, this scheme won't use rootkits or need to make sneaky changes to the OS, but it's still DRM is every sense (except perhaps as far as Steam's own marketing is concerned). The game is encrypted using a unique key. You connect to Steam's license servers to get authorization to play the game. If anything gets between you ad the license server then you can forget about playing the game you paid for. And if Steam ever goes belly up, your entire games library dies with it.

while I like the idea of ditching physical media in favor of a digital distribution scheme, the scheme makes me a slave to Steam rather than to the disc and serial that I bought.