Next Xbox - No Disc Drive?

[puggsoy]

Something that annoys me with Steam is the "You must be online" aspect - while they give an option to be in offline mode, you can't do anything at all except delete games... Which would mean if I had a laptop and wanted to play games on, say, a train, I wouldn't be able to.

I used to think you had to be online to run Steam games too, but that's just if you want to launch them from the Steam client. (Which is kind of illogical.) All of the game's assets and data are locally on your harddrive, so all you really have to do is dig through your Steam installation folder for the game's executable binary and run it from there.

At least that's what it let me do for all the demos I downloaded. If a particular title uses third-party DRM, there's a good chance it'd cripple itself without an internet connection anyway.

Not all games allow that, especially Valve games that you downloaded with Steam. No matter what, there's no way I can find to run GMod or TF2 without opening Steam. Maybe if you got TF2 from the Orange Box then it'd be possible, but not like this.
But other games like Audiosurf and World Of Goo do allow it, and maybe Spiral Knights too.

True.
But by DRM I actually meant "you're not allowed to install this more than 5 times" kind of thing. I know that the meaning of DRM is way more general than that, but that's what I meant.

AFAIK, only SecuRom does that, and that's only to ensure the software is installed on five machines or less at once, not just five installs.

Actually, some games used to do that, you couldn't get back installs. But now most do have that feature. And I think there are some other names than SecuRom, but they're practically identical anyway.