History of/Always online DRM

I recently watched this interesting short documentary summarising the history of DRM in computer games, from the 70's to today. It's interesting to see the progression in the ways companies have attempted to protect their products from piracy and how we came to have the systems that are put in place today. Always online DRM is showing up more and more in massive titles such as Diablo 3 and the long awaited new addition to the SimCity franchise. It's overwhelmingly clear that by and large the consumer base despises this kind of content restriction, and developers have felt this first hand; in an 'Ask Me Anything' thread on Reddit posted by a Maxis development team users showed an overwhelming negative reaction to the notion of forced online play. Companies using this kind of DRM are holding the games you buy hostage and the consumers aren't buying it. What will happen when they decide to shut down the servers that not only contain all of your save data but your ability to play a game that you bought? (this question could also be applied to games that lie undownloaded in Steam).

Is this a start of a darker age of buying games, or a short lived trend that the community will rebuff? DRM doesn't have to be so draconian, as we can see in Steam, so why the heavy handedness? It seems strange that these well known studios can be so out of touch with or totally ignorant of the community opinions, and their plans originally meant to save themselves money will in the long run both damage their reputations and their profits. It's as though they treat the entire community as people who would pirate at the first chance they had, so they take away the right of play without supervision. To me it seems a destructive and counterproductive way of protecting content, but it is one of those things that is a long progression of seemingly reasonable small steps that result in an almost totalitarian gaming environment.

One of the more interesting forms of DRM