They were always a thing but I hadn't realised how bad they'd gotten until I had yet again tried playing yet another 'modern' title. It's a combination of legal requirements + corporate + general dickishness when there is literally nothing stopping them from playing it once and being able to check a box to never see that crap again.

But no, I have to wait for the stupid timer on the splashscreen to count down every time and it really demotivates me from even loading the game up because I'm somebody who likes to hop in and out of games while I'm working on other stuff. Then there's the one that I'm quite sympathetic towards other people on and it's the fact you have to constantly keep creating accounts for things even though you're already logging into the spyware they're selling the game on.

I hate it, it reminds me of when you legally buy a movie and you had to click through multiple fucking windows and splash screens which were just ads to play anything and when you downloaded the pirated version it instantly worked. Oh and no big studios I am not epileptic please stop putting a warning up every five fucking seconds when I want to simply launch the damn game.

Edit: I forgot the fucking endless captchas they're now forcing you to do to log in, they don't even code them properly and give you incorrect error messages if something goes wrong the lazy fucks.