Before Steam I'll admit I was a PC pirate. Living in Australia games would (and still do) often cost far too much and be hard to find. In my city we had a handful of stores with a decent stock of PC games. Because they were mostly imported from America there'd be a hefty import cost on top of that. Another option was to mail a money order off to a store and wait anywhere between 2 weeks and a few months to get your game. The easiest option by far was to dial in to a BBS and download a game overnight, or swap disks with your friends.
Then internet came along and being stuck in my ways I continued to pirate things. The internet made it so much easier! Anyway fast forward to around the release of HL2 and Steam. Pirating HL2 proved a bit tricky/buggy/crappy so I figured "hey I've waited forever to play this so I might as well buy it" - and I did. After that I can't recall pirating any PC games. Steam makes it too easy to buy things. Plus they listen. They give a shit. It's always getting updates and despite some publishers jamming their shitty DRM into their games on Steam (uPlay/GFWL) I really don't feel like it's "DRM". It's pretty unobtrusive. Especially when not long before it shit like Safedisc/Securom were fucking with OS CDROM drivers or other games were installing rootkits.
The XBone, on the other hand, already makes it feel like we're being reamed by DRM. I still don't fully understand it despite watching a 40 minute video of the team explaining it. 40 minutes and even they sounded like they were still confused. It shouldn't be like that. You shouldn't have to worry about things like that before you buy a game. I get that MS are trying to catch up to services like Steam but they come across as arrogant. "Sorry, if you don't have a stable internet connection you can just eat shit". That's the biggest issue for me. Like, I spend hundreds of dollars on a thing and I can't play games on it when I want. Too bad if you've just moved or a storm blows through your area and knocks out the internet for a few days. Too bad if the MS servers go down. Your bone is suddenly a useless box. It almost makes me want to go back to piracy.
I know I don't technically OWN anything I've purchased on Steam and that one day it will cease to exist but I'm fine with that. As long as the internet exists the files for those games will be floating around out there and no doubt there'll be a way to play them without Steam, if that day ever comes. The same reason I'm fine with the thousands of dollars I've spent on 360 games. I realise XBL on 360 will probably be dead (shutdown by MS) in a few years from now but that doesn't make much difference. Once the bone is unsheathed publishers will start shutting down servers for their 360 games as the communities there die anyway. Still, I'll be able to pick up a game off the shelf, slap it in a 360 and play whenever I want. Internet or no.
What happens when the bone servers get shut down? If the current tone is anything to go by you'll have a useless box full of games you cannot play unless you mod it. Circumventing the law to play games you paid for. A new type of piracy?
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