Honestly the thing that sunk this game for me was that, at least on the 360, I had to maintain this sort of uncomfortable monkey grip on the controller to be able to play. It's default button mapping scheme, to my mind, was atrocious. Couple that with the fact that, as a native PC gamer, I've never gotten over the feeling that playing FPSes with a gamepad feels more like "steering" the character than actually being the character, and the game failed to grab me.

Sorry, but no.

First of all, several people have mentioned this already but it bears repeating, this is not "hassle free" in the slightest. Keeping track of disks is enough of a pain in the posterior. USB dongles are small and easily misplaced. Also, I happen to use my USB ports, thank you. My mouse, keyboard, art tablet, printer, scanner, and joystick stick their proverbial tongues out at your dongle. Yeah, I have two free in the front - but I use those for temporary-but-legitimate uses already, like connecting my camera, mp3 player, and USB memory sticks. If I'm having to constantly remove dongles to do it, that's not hassle free.

But beyond that, the realities of the idea are problematic at best. On a five thousand dollar piece of software, a dongle is at best a fraction of a percent of the overall price of the package. On a 30-60 dollar piece of software, however, I would expect prices to rise to include this new "feature". And what about replacements for the inevitable fraction of these certainly mass-produced-by-the-lowest-bidder-in-godknowshwere-China doohickeys that simply don't work? Or for people who lose theirs, or it breaks or malfunctions in some way? Yes, yes, all these are already issues - a certain fraction of CDs are defective out of the box, CDs get lost and scratched, etc. But you're essentially doubling the potential things that can go wrong from the get go with this idea.

And none of this addresses the core problem that people have been pointing out for years - none of this works. You can find any software package you care to name, costing thousands of dollars, on the black seas of the pirate-infested internet. Inevitably someone finds a work around, be it cracking the protection, circumventing it, spoofing authentication codes, whatever. And as pointed out, this doesn't take months or years.

But all that said, Mr. Marx has one good point - it's not just the end users. We're the only one who get treated like thieves, but how do you think so many games hit the pirate scene days or sometimes weeks before release? Whether the leak comes from someone in the company that develops the game, the publisher, the disk stamper, or any of several other points where the often less-than-secure code changes hands, there are problems. Better security here could be useful, yes, but it's really irrelevant to the discussion of end-user security... Despite Mr. Marx assertion that his company provides an all-in-one solution, I don't think anyone seriously thinks that the answer for corporate security and keeping Joe McTorrentgoogler in line are the same thing.