Smiley's Life

Packing in a nicely-chilled cocktail of “only-disc-checking-and-street-date-verification” SecuROM and Games for Windows LIVE, BioShock 2 seemed like it would survive a bit without being cracked and pirated. Alas, thanks to 2K releasing it 5 days early (hereby defeating the point of their street date verification, that was implemented to make sure no one played ahead of release), hackers had a few days before the real, grand release to start cracking it. And after hearing about it and checking, I can safely say BioShock 2 has been fully cracked and can be easily found online in PC and XBOX 360 flavors.

I have several issues with Games For Windows LIVE, most importantly the fact its client won’t run on my computer: Because it is a Hebrew version of XP, which requires a patch to run the new version, and because Israel (where Hebrew is the main language) isn’t supported by LIVE, there is no patch for Hebrew versions and because of that, I cannot run the client and buy any DRM for GTA IV, for example. (This will be one of the few times I will pirate content, despite my moral disagreement with it. Hey, if I can’t pay them for it in any way despite wanting to, that’s the only choice I have left.) However, even though SecuROM has yet to cause any issues on my computer - *knocks on wood* - I still don’t like the fact it was included along with GFWL in both retail and digital versions, especially Steam’s. I think they made a mistake using these two in the first place.

Another reason why this type of DRM shouldn’t be used is that a lot of games not using it have easily sold a massive number of copies, and ended up becoming less pirated than protected products. For example, Mass Effect 2 has no DRM at all and yet it sold more than two million units in its first week of release. The only form of DRM I agree with is Steam’s, because it’s the most flexible form of DRM possible that benefits the publisher and customer equally and because it can be circumvented quite easily if the service is unavailable or unstable for some odd reason. (Obviously, I will not post details here. Or anywhere.)

2K Games, I suggest you to learn from this mistake. Using intrusive DRM is never a good thing. Let’s admit it, EA is the last publisher to stop using DRM, so if it decided to stop using SecuROM DRM in Steam versions, and perhaps stop using it altogether in retail versions (Mass Effect 2 is one hint), maybe it’s a sign for you to stop as well. And for crying out loud, don’t release a game without DRM and later bundle downloadable content for the game with DRM like you did with Borderlands. That’s just sneaky and even more unfair to the customer.