2K on Bioshock: "Why should your brother play for free?

[Furyo]

I'm always wary of any "OMFG Boycott" reactions. They get blown out of proportion every time, and it's just not part of my culture. The "I'm never buying anything from them in my life" attitude is just too simple for my own taste.

I happen to have bought the CE this week end, so I could have that very nice miniature big daddy, and I'm just loving the game in and out. Haven't had a single problem activating it, playing it, never crashed, etc.

As games developers ourselves (some of us), we need to put ourselves in their shoes. Yes you're buying a DRM filled game, but you're also supporting a whole team of developers and not just the publisher, who is solely responsible for this commercial strategy.

Had anyone on Mapcore worked on this game, I can promise we wouldn't even have that discussion and we'd be supporting the dev team who just outdid every single industry standards I can think of.

I don't buy games very often, and I often say I'd rather play 2 95%+ games a year than 10 80% games. Bioshock is worth every cent of its price tag. And seen as I install my games on a separate partition, and don't plan on formatting it, it'll be a long time before I run out of activation trials.

[Mazy]

Indeed, people need to cool down. And to be honest then this kind of reply and action from 2K doesn't surprise me at all. They're really begging for a kick in the face with this kind of attitude but I'm surprised that you're surprised by this kind of thing. I'm sure all publishers would love to have each user buy their own copy even if they all live under the same roof, some just don't have the balls to pull that kinda thing yet it seems. After all, no matter what anybody says then they're here for the money, not to please you

Oh and btw, consoles ftw, fuck the PC

[clayman]

Oh and btw, consoles ftw, fuck the PC

NOOO!!!

[dux]

Screw consoles. They are for gays.

[JohnC]

They put Securom on your computer without asking you, which isn't legal really. Software qualifies as a good and they have no right to tell you what you can do with it after you purchase it.

They ignored countless messages from customers on their forums, and email. Several Tech support moderators joined the forums, but never posted a thing.

They told their community of paying customers that everyone was on vacation.

I say it's still well within proportion. These sellouts are an insult to the gaming industry and a black eye on any image it had left, especially the action genre. I'm just afraid of the same crap being pulled with Mafia 2.

[st0lve]

1 word that I've been in love with lately:

ASSHOLES

[KoKo5oVaR]

I'm always wary of any "OMFG Boycott" reactions. They get blown out of proportion every time, and it's just not part of my culture. The "I'm never buying anything from them in my life" attitude is just too simple for my own taste.

Then try to find me what other pressure means could you have against a publishing company as a customer rather than giving them no money ?

Open a competitive publishing company ? Being super rich and buying all their actions ? Going all John Wayne and rampaging the publisher's offices ??

But haha, yeah actually if every single angry player of bioshock buy actions from 2k games and then altogether ask for their money, they are ruined

[Furyo]

I'm always wary of any "OMFG Boycott" reactions. They get blown out of proportion every time, and it's just not part of my culture. The "I'm never buying anything from them in my life" attitude is just too simple for my own taste.

Then try to find me what other pressure means could you have against a publishing company as a customer rather than giving them no money ?

Open a competitive publishing company ? Being super rich and buying all their actions ? Going all John Wayne and rampaging the publisher's offices ??

But haha, yeah actually if every single angry player of bioshock buy actions from 2k games and then altogether ask for their money, they are ruined

What I meant was to emphasize the "in my life" part of things. People blame companies today for what happened 15-20 years ago, or will blame 2K for the next decade because of the Bioshock release.

Besides the drama just escalates. Sure your only means to get your point across is to not buy the game. Big deal. Your money is a drop of water in the ocean and the only way that your own action could hurt them was if you mutualized it. Went on a rampage protest with hords of people under your unified banner.

Like that's gonna happen.....

Remember Ubisoft placed Securom in SCCT. Are you still holding a grudge against them for this? If you look at the big picture, no one gives a damn, or remembers any of that.

So be pissed all you want, but

1) you're missing out on a great game

2) The dev team behind the crappy publishing practices deserve to be supported

3) You can always get yourself a rented x360 and play that.

[Mojo]

from what I read last night that tech is actually not someone that works with 2K but some offsite tech support or something (read on shacknews and confirmed by the main community manager - http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=150 ... r_15071054)

But some interesting points were brought up (If you buy a movie, you don't buy it for everyone, etc), but it makes sense with computers (in a way). It should be one key per computer, not per user on computer, but I am probably just regurgitating what has been said already.

[D3ads]

That's lame, but pretty unsurprising.

[jaboo224]

game drama!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! D:!

My personal opinion is that i agree that 2k games should of not put this securom bullshit with their game. it only ruins it for the people who don't warez or download illegally.

does the steam version do the same thing?

[leileilol]

Remember Ubisoft placed Securom in SCCT. Are you still holding a grudge against them for this? If you look at the big picture, no one gives a damn, or remembers any of that.

i'm still pissed over starforce in trackmania sunrise

[aevirex]

I'm still pissed about StarForce in Trackmania Nations (a free game for those who don't know)!

[JAL]

I don't really believe in software such as StarForce or Securom. Because

they do very little to stop piracy. Every single one of those silly

anti-piracy softwares can be cracked or disabled.

It's not like a person who is 100% sure he's downloading the game online

(in other words pirating it) suddenly decides not to do it

because of some copyright protection software. He doesn't have to worry

about such bullshit because the torrent website he usually visits is now

providing the full game cracked and working.

Sure if a game doesn't have übercopyrightprotection it will be on the web

before you can say 'oh snap' but the same will happen to games that have it.

Also I'm not talking about myself, I bought Bioshock on Steam

[Fletch]

After the Shack news update, I surfed around and dug up some more about this. Basically this is what happened. It was a family computer and the dad had the admin account. Everybody else had private accounts with all the XP privacy settings turned on, meaning that if you installed software, it only installed for your user (unless you were the admin), and you can't access things installed on other user's parts of the harddrive. One kid installed Bioshock and the other wanted to play, but couldn't access. Secrumrom got fucked up because it said it was already installed on the computer (so says the registry), but the kid couldn't access it.

So its partially the dad's fault for the uber-privacy setup on the computer, partially the kids fault for installing it on his account and not getting teh dad to install it on the master account, and partially securerom's fault for an obscure design defect.

But because the internet is a bunch of fucked up idiots with too much free time, it's 2K's fault. Go figure.

In the long run, none of this matters. The five install limit is annoying, but nobody bothered to ask why they hell somebody had installed a game more than 5 times in less than 2 days. The widescreen issue is just fucking dumb. It's the default behavior for UE3, and nobody noticed or cared about it on R6:Vegas, so that says something there. Critical people will find reasons to be critical, and the gaming "media" will continue to fuel it because they want more diggs. End of story.