December 26th, 2007

by PacManPolarBear (http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/author/pacmanpolarbear/)

http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/countdown-banner2.gif

http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/bioshock_box.jpg

Top Gaming Moment # 52: August, 2007

Source: SarcasticGamer (http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/2007/11/anti-piracy-against-pirates-ends-up-pirating-paying-customers.html) & GameSpot (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6183311.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=morenews&tag=morenews;title;5)

The “Big Daddy” of FPS titles this year suffered in only one regard; how it attempted to slow down PC piracy and failed miserably. Whereas consoles are for the most part safe from widespread piracy and massive Peer-To-Peer game sharing; PC games are consistently undercut by it.

This year 2K came up with a “brilliant” plan to try and prevent this phenomenon from hurting their pride and joy. The plan entailed having every PC customer connect to their servers for an auto-patch since the core DVD itself did not included a needed .EXE file needed to play. Too bad they must have not expected their game to do so well because their servers crashed off and on during the initial release. 2K’s forum and others were aflame with angry BioShockers screaming for this damn .EXE file.

Find out why it made the list, after the jump

Not only did this setup piss gamers off *cough* but it also totally failed to prevent the game from being hacked and spread online. They say they were hack free for 13 days but I’ve “heard” otherwise. 2K said that they would not repeat this exact setup again, but that they would do something similar for future releases. Why? Who the hell knows? They said their main goal was to maintain first week sales. While stopping pirates for your first week does give you a temporary boost to sales, in the end it is the quality of the game itself that makes it a financial success or not (as BioShock itself has proven rather plainly).

Like I said before “Stop putting bubble gum on my front door and calling it a better type of door lock, when it still only takes one swift kick to knock the thing down!”

For pissing off loyal paying gamers and making PC pirates everywhere laugh, BioShocks ill conceived copyright protection checks in at number 52 on Sarcastic Gamer’s top 100 Gaming moments of 2007!

Click here for the rest of Sarcastic Gamer’s Top 100 Gaming Moments from 2007 all in one place! (http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/index.php/top-100)

yet another reason why pc gaming sucks.

yet another reason why pc gaming sucks.

Bit off a cheap shot there? :p

yet another reason why pc gaming sucks.

I could make this a blow-for-blow between consoles and PCs (each in turn), but I think I will stand higher then that.

Having seen the game in action, I will repeat Yatzee's view... I basically played this back in 98.... as System Shock 2 with less graphics and more depth/difficulty.

You'd really think they'd have come up with a solution to it by now, Crysis' and UT3's sales were complete crap due to piracy

You'd really think they'd have come up with a solution to it by now, Crysis' and UT3's sales were complete crap due to piracy

Im not so sure....

UT3: Unless you are a fan of UT, you probably ignored this, as it is literally the EXACT SAME GAME as every other UT that has ever hit.

Crysis: It take's a special breed to spend the cash to make this work well. I expect the sales will pick up in another year or so, but for now, it filled it's niche as far as anything could.

Yet another reason why I dont buy games for my PC.

Im not so sure....

UT3: Unless you are a fan of UT, you probably ignored this, as it is literally the EXACT SAME GAME as every other UT that has ever hit.


'Bit of a blatant statement there. The same could be said about Halo, and most other shooter sequels.

PC gaming does not suck. -_-

I was part of this problem...took me 2 days to get it working.

Just curious, has any other PC game recently had the same copyright protection? Or did the developers learn from the Backlash that Take 2 took?

'Bit of a blatant statement there. The same could be said about Halo, and most other shooter sequels.

Halo 2 and 3 are NOT retellings of 1 or each other. They play the same, but they are new stories with new maps. UT may or may not have new maps, but it is literally a retelling of every single UT made so far.

Now if it were reimagined like say Doom 3 (to a horror survival styled game instead of run-and-gun), I wouldnt give it crap for that... but what is there to reimagine?

Personally, Im passing till they can give me a REAL Unreal 3.

I don't think there will never be uncrackable copy protection on the PC. It is an inherent problem with an open system. All copy protection systems rely on decrypting the .exe files to launch the game. The problem is that this only needs to be done once, then the information required to launch the game is available and it can be reverse engineered.

New technologies such as what was used in bioshock slow the hackers down for a short period of time. But these are the sort of people that see any type of DRM as a challenge that needs to be beaten. Also it is not practical for publishes to use a new generation of copy protection with every release. The next game that uses bioshock's approach will be broken much more quickly.

The only way that truely secure DRM could happen on the PC would be some sort of virtual machine that contains vital game data. Similar to the way BD+ works in blu-ray. However this is more difficult to do securely on a PC than on a dedicated piece of hardware. The technology does exist to an exent on some PCs with TPM modules and the like. But I don't think consumers will accept the hardware requirements and loss of control of their machines that would be required for this sort of DRM to succeed.

The game companies know that their protection will be cracked. However they see copy protection as a way of delaying the inevitable. A delay in which some pirates will give up and buy the game.

I don't mind copy protection as long as it is not intrusive. Until Bioshock I would have said that safedisc and securom were the best options that I have had. With the likes of Starforce being abominations that just screw with my system. But the latest version of securom changes that. Seeing that it is now a "phone home" protection that in my opinion interferes with my rights.

I must say since having my 360 I am really enjoying the total lack of hassles involved in playing a game. If only all the genre's I enjoy were on the 360 in a decent form I could be converted.

Meh. Bioshock didn't really appeal to me much. This puts me off even more.