I never do day 1 purchases. I wait for reviews and more importantly I use sites like Blues to distill what a game is like before I just jump in and buy it.

That's an interesting comment. You realize you're being ultra careful buying game because you don't want to risk buying something you don't like? (what it sounds like to me anyway) With current DRM on most PC games what would be the harm of companies offering a trial of the game after you install, it's not activated at that point but it's online drm like we see in Assassin's Creed 2 and after an hour it says would you like to activate? (aka keep playing?)

You could easily try whatever game you wanted and you wouldn't have to read reviews and study user comments, you could just see for yourself. This is what i'm advocating for pc gaming. For the moment this isn't possible so my comments point at things I currently do to try games that I'm probably not going to like with little to no risk. I like playing games, I don't like feeling ripped off. Your own habits seem to indicate you feel the same way.

The pc gaming community would be a hell of a lot better off if a service like steam or any of the online dist services offered free trials of virtually any game you want. Have it limited for each account, IE I can load and play Half Life 3 (for example) 1 time and play for an hour or 2 hours or whatever. If I like it I then press the activate (purchase button). This is more realistic for online purchases, retail returns come with all sorts of other issues but I'm sure they could figure something out.