In May, I discovered the wonders of Steam. It was the answer to my college gaming concerns. Having never been much of a PC gamer before, only dabbling in a couple RTS games from the late 90's and the Sims, my new laptop turned out to be adequate at running most modern games on moderate settings. Steam has become my friend with its insane sales, ability to download most games as many times as I want, and a great selection. DRM restricts the use of the game to your account, but it does not require you to be online at all times. It's a very liberal DRM policy that gives the user plenty of freedom without having to worry about some people exploiting the system. 
 
However, nothing gold can stay. Yesterday I bought Mass Effect for five dollars because it was a game I'd always heard was great, but couldn't play because I have a PS3. So it finished downloading all 10 GB and click "Play" only to be met with the message "Failed to contact key server". After confirming I was still connected to the Internet and wasn't mysteriously disconnected during the two minutes between when the game finished downloading and I clicked "Play", I searched Steam's site for some help, but all they had was this. I knew this couldn't be right because I had download dozens of games from Steam already and hadn't had a problem with one of them. 
 
I ended up finding a topic created back in January with people who had the same problem during a previous Mass Effect sale. It turns out that Steam didn't have enough CD keys on hand to distribute when the game was released. It's happening to a ton of people who bought the game yesterday, as well.
 
CD keys? Really? Aren't we a little beyond that archaic copy protection system? Isn't Steam supposed to negate all that? Your login IS your "CD key"! Either the developers were too lazy to edit the code for the Steam release, or EA is too over protective with their DRM. 
 
It's such a paradox. The people who legitimately buy the game, the ones who are giving the developers their due because they appreciate the work that goes into the production of a game get punished because the publisher can't trust them to not share the game. I know people who would pirate games like Mass Effect without a second thought to the morality of the action. And they would be happily playing now, not waiting for Valve to get more CD keys from EA. It's so infuriating that the ones who AREN'T stealing the game have to put up with this bull while you could easily pirate the game and not have to worry about any of that. 
 
DRM NEEDS to die. It has no place today. It does not prevent piracy. It punishes the legitimate user. EA publishes games for incredible developers, but EA as the publisher is garbage. How much foresight does it take to realize taking this action isn't going to save any lost sales. It's not going to prevent the game from being hacked by some guy and uploaded to be downloaded for free. EA should be encouraging their customers, not discouraging them. If I ever have this problem with EA's games again, then I might reconsider legitimately purchasing their games.

I fully agree with your views on DRM. 
However, to be fair, serial keys are usually as harmless as they come as long as they're not bundled with a nice package of SecuROM, Tages or whatever else they'll come up with next. It's pretty ridiculous that Steam would run out, though and that being not the first time it happened,  you'd think they'd take precautions this time and learn from their mistakes.

the problem is that most games are also written to be sold at retail. So a CD Key is needed to play it. The SecuROM DRM could also be to blame but who knows. EA could get around all of this by using the retail portions of Steamworks. But there are some people who don't like Steam for some strange reason. I think all games could benefit from using Steamworks. DRM isn't going away and neither is piracy. You just gotta try to avoid the draconian stuff like Ubisofts DRM and Starforce in favor of Steamworks.

It's almost beating a dead horse to say that DRM only hurts legitimate users, and does nothing to prevent pirates from downloading the game for free regardless. However, it's a point that can't be negated nor spoken loudly enough. The fact that you can't play a digitally downloaded game because of a CD key is pathetic and I can totally see how frustrating that must be.
 
Honestly though, EA is a fucking horrible company and I avoid their games as much as possible. It's sad that most of the gaming populace appears to unaware or just not care when companies like EA, Activision, and Gamestop sorely abuse and take advantage of their customers. Pretty much any other Steam game would not have this type a problem as far as I'm aware, and EA is likely exactly who to blame.

"But there are some people who don't like Steam for some strange reason. I think all games could benefit from using Steamworks. "

" the problem is that most games are also written to be sold at retail. So a CD Key is needed to play it. The SecuROM DRM could also be to blame but who knows. EA could get around all of this by using the retail portions of Steamworks. But there are some people who don't like Steam for some strange reason. I think all games could benefit from using Steamworks. DRM isn't going away and neither is piracy. You just gotta try to avoid the draconian stuff like Ubisofts DRM and Starforce in favor of Steamworks. "

" @clarke0:  Not entirely true. A few games including Prey a few months ago, had the same issue.  It's not only EA. And to their credit, they did remove the SecuROM DRM along with the limited activations on Steam, so they're not entirely evil. "

I guess Valve is partly to blame considering that they didn't get enough CD keys in the first place. Although, the issue leaves me wondering why exactly a Steam game needs a CD key in the first place. Doesn't Steam already have a verification process for it's games and reasonable DRM? "

" @SlasherMan: Its better than having to deal with all the stupid shit that secuROM, ubisoft's DRM and Starforce bring to the table. "

" @AndrewGaspar: I haven't seen any DRM thats as good or better for us gamers than Steamworks. All other forms of common DRM these days have stupid stuff like machine activation limits, no offline play at all and virus like routines that kill CD drives slowly. 

 it's just been such a non-issue in my experience and when people cry about how intrusive DRM is they mostly just sound crazy to me. "

I am finding increasingly frequent examples these days of DRM that are punishing legitimate consumers more than actually punishing pirates. The biggest example of this is the AC2 DRM which actually encouraged people to go pirate the game because they would not be subject to the absurd restrictions of buying a legitimate copy. It is absolutely absurd and this trend of increasing poorly thought out, poorly implemented DRM needs to stop.

that is pretty funny i think. since digital disruption was suppose to take care of CD keys. i hope good luck for you getting a CD key from valve / EA. 
 
DRM should die. it is very bad for consumers. steam is good because it doesn't do anything to screw up the computer. people can go offline if they wanted to. DRM is horrible thing. you always have to be online to play it. you get install limits. lets say a company decides to close down a server that has DRM. people who want to play the game years later can't because the servers are down. the person would have to download pirated version. while people who bought the game have problems, the people that pirated it won't have any kind of problems.