It's not just that Steam has carrots and Ubisoft used sticks. The point of introducing a stick is to hit the people who are misbehaving, so that they'll want to

It's not just that Steam has carrots and Ubisoft used sticks. The point of introducing a stick is to hit the people who are misbehaving, so that they'll want to stop. But Ubisoft is inconveniencing the paying customers more than the pirates. They're using the stick on the wrong people altogether! That creates an entirely backwards incentive scheme. Meanwhile, DRMing a game through Steam makes it more convenient for the consumer rather than less convenient[1]. They turned the protection scheme from a hindrance into a feature, and a desirable one at that. Most importantly, the carrot wasn't just stapled on to sweeten the deal, the features of Steam are leveraging the DRM itself. I have never heard anyone say "man Steam is awesome, but they should take out the DRM"--it's an intrinsic part of the additional features. That's what makes it so impressive to me. [1] There are tradeoffs so YMMV, but the tradeoffs are easily worthwhile for the majority of players, which is Good Enough.