Da Man Backflip on Bioshock DRM
Gamers against Da Man have scored a minor victory today with the announcement that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) will be removed from Bioshock. The news was delivered via a 2K Games forum. And it reads from Community Manager, 2K Elizabeth:“Good news! As promised, all activation restrictions, including install limits, have been removed from Bioshock PC as of today. You don't have to patch or install anything for this to go into effect for your copy of Bioshock – it's already done!
Enjoy your time in Rapture, and thank you for supporting Bioshock and the 2K teams”
Interesting news considering how much as been said of late about PC Game piracy. The recent collapse of Iron Lore Entertainment (creator of Titan Quest) was partly blamed on game piracy. Gamepro recently reported that PC game piracy could be as high as 70 – 80 per cent. This back down on the DRM of Bioshock has come after fierce debate has raged over the limitations of the DRM imposed on gamers for this particular game release. The DRM restricted the number of installs of the game. It also restricted use of the game if the computer with the game installed wasn't connected to the internet within a period of time (under 2 weeks).
It is a strange set of circumstances. Maybe there hasn't been anything as controversial with regards to DRM since the introduction of StarForce copy protection. One one hand publishers and developers are saying that piracy is killing the industry and yet they are removing the protection on a high selling game. To go from full protection to no protection is a little bit unusual.
Needless to say that the developers do listen to gamers ... eventually.
posted by thecynicalgamer @ 2:35 pm
2 Comments:
At 10:30 am,
Anonymous said…
i think that the normal KEY is the best way to go. having to log onto the net to register and activate a single player game, or any game for that matter, is taking it to the overkill. having to do such, is helping to keep the piracy booming.
what you dont hear is how successful, is the re-releasing of the old games for $19.95 and $9.95, even diablo 2 is still around the $49.95, and selling well. C&C generals and zero hour are still BIG sellers.
to me this is saying that the devlopers still making good money on old games, and that people do buy originals games more than copying them.
At 11:08 am,
thecynicalgamer said…
The cover price of the games has to be considered to be part of the issue around increased piracy. Especially when the cover price of games in Australia is far higher than overseas.
The only problem with lowering prices that I can see is that this would come down at the expense of the retailer.
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