No, it's worse; in 5 or 10 years, you may no longer be able to play these games. With CDs / manuals, it's not a problem.
I'm currently playing (or rather, trying to play) Assassin's Creed. It's a series I never got into, so I bought the first two on Steam. Guess what? The servers at Ubisoft have been turned off. This leads to multi-second pauses every 60 seconds, and after various game events - http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33046... . At least the game still sort-of works, but if they "improve" the DRM any further, they'll be completely broken in the future.
In principle, I agree. But I haven't lost any CDs or manuals; if anything, they've become collectible items. Importantly, I have control over them; and no-cd cracks aren't exactly rare.
But with servers, there is no control. And it seems an obvious further development of DRM is to host some of the application code remotely, so that no simple workaround will be available to your children, should they want to see what games were like in your youth.
I'm currently playing (or rather, trying to play) Assassin's Creed. It's a series I never got into, so I bought the first two on Steam. Guess what? The servers at Ubisoft have been turned off. This leads to multi-second pauses every 60 seconds, and after various game events - http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33046... . At least the game still sort-of works, but if they "improve" the DRM any further, they'll be completely broken in the future.