Does Steam care more about pirates than its customers?

I've been watching The Pacific, which made me want to play "Crysis" (Image via Wikipedia)

I don’t want to rain on the good Steam press parade happening right now (Steam recently announced it would start distributing their games on Macs),  but while I was moving this weekend, Steam let me down.  I  did not have internet access from Friday to Monday because I was moving. To someone addicted to Team Fortress 2, four days is a long time. I tried to fill my FPS void with Crysis, thinking it would still play without an internet connection. I don’t need an internet connection to play Crysis, right? Wrong!

Booting up Crysis in Steam’s offline mode couldn’t, and wouldn’t happen, because Steam didn’t believe that I had an authentic copy of Crysis, never mind that I had purchased it through Steam.  How is this possible? I’ve played Crysis countless times before, and the game was authenticated when I first got it. How could Steam let me down, now, in my hour of need, when it is supposed to be the savior of PC gaming? At the time, I felt like I was being punished, maybe for not getting Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse.  If only that were the truth!

Now that I have internet access, I did some googling, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Steam might be paranoid:

“In general, it seems DRM restrictions in gaming are becoming more intrusive and creating problems for genuine customers, rather than the pirates who happily bypass these measures every time,” Boyd said. “PC gaming should be about portability – what use are games you can’t play at the airport or on a train if you can’t get online?”

via Hackers Crack Ubisoft always-online DRM controls

But wait, doesn’t Steam have digital technology that makes DRM obsolete?  Then why I couldn’t play Crysis?

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