If you buy a game with DRM, this doesn't mean that you wanted to buy a game with DRM. Most likely - you wanted to buy a game and it had DRM. You caved in and bought it. There's not a lot of people who would not buy it only because of DRM but a lot of them would appreciate its lack and almost everyone, at the very least, won't mind. Since the product ends up bought, there is no economical reason to change the distribution model.
That's why I mentioned boycotts, since voting with your wallet would seem to be the obvious answer. On the other hand - we don't want to leave the company without any money, because there would be no one to learn anything if they went down and we DO want to play the games... so we buy. And even if some of us don't buy, it's usually blamed on piracy and not the anti-DRM stance.

Also - if a person wouldn't get the game regardless of DRM, this is irrelevant to what we're describing and if you suggest that the "general trends" are people not buying it BECAUSE of DRM but wanting it otherwise... that's what I call a boycott, hence I used the term.

I don't think that's the point. The point is that at some point in the future you might want to play the game but the activation server is no longer running, and you're out of luck. Sure, maybe this 'long-term rental' model is reasonable for you - but it's something a consumer should consider when making their purchase.

When Blizzard's activation servers are no longer up, I don't think you'll be worrying about playing Starcraft 2 any longer. And, in the event that they do go down and Blizzard doesn't patch the game (unlikely), you can just crack it yourself. It's a non-issue.

No, it's a non-issue because Blizzard's servers will never go down, and even if they did, you could crack the game, which only a fool would think is equivalent to piracy.

You're only considering the two extremes: people who will buy a game regardless of DRM (no matter how much they may complain), and those who will pass even on games they're otherwise quite interested in due to DRM (and while this group includes myself, i recognize that it's a fairly small group). However, there's a large middle ground between the extremes, people who aren't closely following a particular game, but may take notice and buy it if it looks good and seems like a good value. For these people, who can basically either take or leave any particular game, and are often considering more games than they have money or time for, nearly every aspect of the game, including DRM, will factor into whether they buy the game or take a pass in favor of another game.

This is basically the same as with any other type of product: there are people who are certain to buy your product, there are people who will never buy your product, and there are people who might buy your product (depending on the details of your product). And how sales fare with this latter group can easily mean the difference between a highly successful product, a slightly successful product, or an unsuccessful product.

You're again making the mistake of thinking this is about principles- it's not. It's purely about people acting out of self-interest in their purchasing decisions. In other words, buying products that they think are worth the asking price, and not buying products that they don't think are worth the asking price (or which aren't perceived as being as good a value as a competing product). In short, it's just basic microeconomics at work.

However, we seem to have veered away from the original topic of discussion and into an area of conversation that holds little interest for me these days. So I probably won't be partaking any further.

Just quoting this, as it's pretty much exactly what I'd have posted if I'd seen the thread earlier.

Sort of like Walmart's music servers will never go down, or MS' music servers? Oh wait...

I guess it might seem that way to me if I were illiterate too.

Not only that, but their servers have turned into a steaming cesspit of hacking, griefing, and duping before. Their servers were not pleasant back then and you bet if their money printing machine, WOW ever does go down the toilet they are going to be pretty screwed in the short term.

It costs Blizzard more to have their servers go down. And once again, their servers would have to be down for 30 days to have that effect. Do you really think WoW servers would be down for a month?

Do you really think Sony's PSN servers would be down for a month? That would cost Sony billions!

Not really, what if it's 29.9 days since someone last authenticated?

It's odd to play any game once a month. Nevertheless, they should either wait or crack the game.

Who says they haven't been playing it? It has an 'offline' mode doesn't it? I mostly play on my laptop and have very irregular access to an internet connection. It really boils down to the question "Why should you have to have an internet connection at all to play the single player portion of a game sold at retail?"

Well, in Starcraft you could make the argument that you need it to be able to utilize the features that being online adds - achievements and the ability to talk to your friends who play Blizzard games. You could also make the argument that DRM does in fact scare away some people who would have otherwise pirated the game. I know some people who only pirate games without DRM because they don't want to deal with applying cracks/believe all cracks are malware.