Posts Tagged drm
Bioshock 2 rant on DRM
Posted by Sam in Development, Gaming, Technology on 23 January 2010
I’ll try to keep this as brief and civilised as possible. Now, Bioshock 2 as you may have known is the sequel to Bioshock, a game which caused many controversies over it’s use of DRM, more specifically SecuROM. Complaints from gamers persuaded 2K Games (the publishers) to drop the install limit from five to two, and then remove SecuROM from the game altogether.
Bioshock 2′s system requirements have recently been released however, showing the decision to start using SecuROM again, along with a myriad of other measures which I can only assume are to help prevent piracy, or they would be if they worked. SecuROM is being used as a disk check, that’s all it’s there for. It gets installed on your system to prevent something which can be cracked in a matter of minutes using readily available user made patches. Using disk checks to prevent piracy may have been viable ten years ago but it’s 2010, the age of digital distribution, aren’t disk checks a thing of the past?
On top of that, 2K games are knowingly installing software onto user’s computers which they know will cause problems for certain systems, as they had many complaints from the first game which used the exact same software! The icing on the cake is that SecuROM includes a tool to uninstall it’s software from any computer, safely and legally from their website, in case your system isn’t compatible, which begs the question why bother in the first place.
Also required to play the game is Games For Windows Live (GFWL), Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s bastard offspring, giving you 15 activations before you have to phone up Microsoft and ask for more. Not to mention the requirement to be online to save your game and earn achievements.
It’s time publishers start to realise that these sorts of DRM systems only affect the honest paying consumer, while pirates are free to download un-restricted versions without SecuROM disk checks or GFWL activation limits. Systems like Steam are the way forward whether the industry likes it or not.
Recent Comments