 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Previous in Video Games: Game Reviews: Reviewed | Next in Video Games: Bioshock: DRMShock, Bad to Worse |
Thanks to Taffer for the link to this news item. It’s swiped from the PC Gamer Blog, but I’m linking to Taffer and not the original source because the PC Gamer blog doesn’t have permalinks. (Come on guys! I KNOW you can do better than that. Blogs are not mysterious devices. The functionality is well established and easy to comprehend.)
The upshot of the article is that:
In order for the following to have the proper impact, I should establish my love for this series. The original “Shock” game – System Shock – affected me so strongly that I wrote an entire novel based on the game. The sequel is one of my all-time favorites. I’ve been waiting for this one for the better part of a decade. I’ve been following the story since the first hints of it dropped way back in February of 2006. I’m not just a fan of this series, I’m an avid, nearly rabid fan of this series.
Dear 2kGames. I’ve got sixty bucks right here. And you guys will never see it. Never. I don’t care if I see the game in the bargain bin two years from now for $5. I don’t want it. I also don’t want to hear your crying about pirates ripping you off. You started it. Your box claims “This game requires Online Activation to play”, but if you were honest about what that really means – if you let people know what you were really selling – it would demolish sales. And you know it. I don’t use pirated software, but my fond hope is that the pirates give you the quick humiliation you deserve.
Activating the game twice? I picked up Doom 3 a couple of years ago, and I’ve reinstalled it four times since then as I’ve shuffled games around or upgraded my computer. There is no excuse for thinking like this.
And this just backs up my earlier post on the uselessness of game reviews. This should be the first thing mentioned in every review. PC Gamer talked about it on their blog, but I’ll bet this never makes it into print. It is my hope that gamers pass this along, so that nobody buys this game without knowing what they’re getting into.
EDIT: More here. Looks like you get an activation “back” when you uninstall? How magnanimous of them.
EDIT: More here on the 2k forums. They have flatly claimed that secuROM isn’t a rootkit. That announcement is followed by about four pages of angry responses from users talking about how it is exactly that. I can’t say one way or the other, but if they have added lies to the mix then I think it ought to act as a Tony-Hawk style multiplier on the negative feedback and publicity they might be experiencing.
In the comments below someone points out that the number of installs has been upped from 2 to 5. I will admit that 5 is indeed larger than 2, although it is less than inifinity, which is the number of installs most games permit.
EDIT: More on this at other sites:
The Daily Jump
consumerist
Completely Random Thoughts
hylomorph
Kotaku has a response from Ken Levine
And even the demo installs the rootkit.
EDIT: Looks like The Rampant Coyote is giving the game a pass as well.
Previous in Video Games: Game Reviews: Reviewed | Next in Video Games: Bioshock: DRMShock, Bad to Worse |
There are 77 comments here. I really hope you like reading.
You can only activate the game twice!?! That’s totally unforgivable. If you have to upgrade or your hard drive fails, you’re screwed. I don’t normally wish bad things on game devs, but this game needs to bomb so someone gets the message.
Twice!? Okey lets say this game is the greatest FPS of all times and in say 8 years you look through your old games and decide to play it again, but you have already used up those two activation (very likely since most people dont keep the same game on their computer for years and years and hard drive upgrades and other reasons) what then? You cant even buy it again since almost no store will be selling it even in a bargain bin.
the first time i noticed the game mags started to ease up on their reviews was when half-life 2 came out. . . it had some sort of activation (i think they called it steam or something) that immediately turned me off, and i assumed it would affect the review, but pc gamer (at least i think it was pc gamer) gave the game a score of 11. . . and that was on a scale of 1-10!. . .
they offhandedly mentioned the product activation but it came as a total surprise to me that they’d not only say the game was perfect, they said it was *better* than perfect. . . when i read the review i was kind of like, “what? there’s not only a flaw with this activation crap, you acknowledged it as a flaw and *still* gave it an 11!”. . .
i’m not sure but i got the impression that pc gamer no longer cared about product activation once half-life 2 came out. . .
I find it amusing how there aren’t any comments on this article, yet DMoTR gets 30 to 50 easy. Face it, consumers do not give rat’s tail about being raped by publishers in the guise of anti-piracy. Thus, they deserve what results.
OK, I take it back… Looks like comments get batched. Way to go, people, keep it up.
One thing people seem missing is that the activation is online. Therefore, the activation servers have to be kept up. Anyone cares to guess for how long they are going to stay up? I am quite sure that the game will be plain impossible to activate when it hits the bargain bin. If it weren’t so, I’d still be playing Legends of Kesmai.
Hmm. I wonder if all of the above is true for a Steam download/install of BioShock. If, in fact, it is restricted to “only twice” activation AND this is a permanent feature, that’s unacceptable.
OTOH, this might be a ‘first three months only’ feature to slow piracy/force initial sales, and will be removed in a future patch.
You can only activate it twice, but you get your activation “back” when you uninstall. So it is possible to install it more than twice — provided you uninstall each time.
Details at http://kotaku.com/gaming/more-bioshock-shock/bioshock-pc-+-you-only-install-twice-292222.php (courtesy of Digg).
But it still sucks if you have a hardware failure, or your OS dies on you, huh?
Honestly, I knew about this and bought it anyways. Why did I do that? Two reasons.
1. I really wanted to play it and I don’t have an Xbox. I got it at circut city so in total the game cost me 42 bucks.
2. I am certain that within a few months (at most a year) there will be a crack for this game allowing a bypass for the activation. Either that or there will be a patch later on when 2k realized how f-ed up this is. Either way, something will be done to circumvent it.
Having to constantly deal with Adobe’s Activation Nonsense at work, I can attest that “Activation” is an utter load of BS rolled up in a giant ball of annoyance.
Just for example: You computer crashes in one of those irrecoverable ways. You didn’t deactivate or uninstall any of your software, so you’ve used up an activation. Now when you reinstall your software again later you have to use up another one of your activations. You might think that this would easily be solved by a quick phone call to the company explaining the situation, but no, they think you’re trying to pirate the software or install it on multiple computers or some other nonsense.
I don’t usually get all up in arms about DRM, but the entire “activation” concept is beyond the pale.
The solution to Bioshock? Buy it on the 360. No copy protection, no need to get better, expensive hardware (I’ve played the demo, and Bioshock is -beautiful-. Oh, and graphics intensive). But yes, DRM is a pain, and stupid, and annoying, and this particular branch is incredibly painful, but Bioshock is looking to be the best shooter since Half-life 2, and the best game thematically since I don’t recall when. And to the person who was turned off by Half-Life 2’s product activation, it was relatively simple and straightforward. You had to have a live internet connection to connect to Steam, and you could only have one CD key on 3 computers simultaneously (may be wrong on the facts here, going by memory), but it wasn’t all that restrictive. Oh, and I mostly played Half-Life 2 for the multiplayer, so having to be online didn’t really bother me. Anyways, just my 2 cents.
Oh, that’s okay. I’ve said my “f*** you”s to game publishers years ago.
Reading between the lines on the various fora on this, the current state is:
Bioshock/PC from Steam: 2 PCs total at a time. As of yesterday’s patch, uninstalls actually work.
Bioshock/PC not from Steam: 2 Activations total, uninstall MAY give you an ativation back, but may not. SecuRom (the DRM provider) will tell you to contact 2K. 2K will tell you to contact SecuRom.
Bioshock/PC from warez: completely unrestricted.
Bioshock/360: No known activation issues.
The steam version is really screwed up, because that’s one of the whole premises of steam – that you can buy their games and play them on any PC, whether it’s at a cyber-cafe or at home. I own a handful of games I bought via steam, and they’re mostly right now installed on 3 PCs. My work PC, my upstairs home PC and my downstairs home PC. I’m _really_ glad I didn’t buy the PC version of this game.
@Author, the Steam servers that do the activation are used for all of several game publisher’s games. The newer games that use Steam will more than pay for the older ones’ continued hosting, so it’s very unlikely that Bioshock’s activation will just ‘cease to be.’ A good example is Blizzard’s Battlenet – they still use it for Starcraft, but purchases of their newer games let them continue to host their server – and their older games.
That’s shameless self promo…errr… no, wait, wrong subject. I’m definitely going to read your novel these days – I had no idea it existed and I am wondering about it. Thanks for posting the link.
For Bioshock…nothing to say but agree with you. Steam, limited use activation codes and such are all a blight upon gaming.
Too right, Shamus!
All this online activation for offline games (as opposed to Guild Wars or WOW, where its warranted, I guess) hasn’t been much of a success – I remember how much of a shocker installing Half-life 2 was in the beginning – needing a Steam account, decrypting the data over the internet, then heaven forbid if the installation screwed up….
At least once you’ve spent a week perfecting a flawless install, you can use the steam account to install it on any other computer…the idea of someone only being able to install twice, I agree, is laughable.
Author, I wouldn’t assume that comment volume is proportional to the perceived importance of a topic. Often, the DMotR comments consist largely of banter, which is more appropriate to such a humorous piece rather than something like this. I take these issues rather seriously and am glad I heard of this now, since given the hardware issues I’ve had I’d probably be out of luck pretty quickly. Still, if I don’t have anything interesting to say, I won’t comment.
Zee, on a practical level I can see where you’re coming from. You may well be right that this situation will change soon. However, although I’m willing to be tolerant of software working less and getting in the consumer’s way more than it did years ago, there are certain lines I prefer to draw. I doubt this idealism will make any real difference, but I’m sufficiently annoyed that as a matter of principle I’m not going to buy this thing. I’d rather spend my money to boost sales of a product that doesn’t try too hard to sabotage those who buy it.
Yo, ho, haul together,
hoist the *colours* high.
Heave ho, thieves and beggars,
never *say* we die.
I’m taking the black.
The novel (Shamus’) I read at work, and made me want to play a cyberpunk RPG for months afterwards…
The DRM issue is the bi-product of what some of you have mentioned (the hackers that are just going to fix the issue). But I must prompt this question to the forum…
Which came first the security douche bags or the hackers? Were they one in the same back when movies like “War Games” were released and somewhere down the road the line was drawn? I’d like some input.
I have a extra copy of system shock 2 I dug up the other day when I was cleaning my room. Haven’t played it in years, popped in it, and played it. Sure it had the annoying you have to have the disc in the drive deal with it, but other then that? No other problems.
Unistalled it (Honsetly the grahpics on it are bad to now-ay-days stuff, and it scarded the stuffing out of me.)
and put it back away. Needless to say, this new incarnation is going to be x20 more scarier and I can’t play them kinds of games, so I wont be getting it.
Now if it was more like a myst/riven/ deal where there was puzzels are not as scary (I always play easy mode) then sure
though that 2 activation thing really makes me pissed. How stupid.
Anyways, Shamus, if you want that old copy of SS2 let me know i’ll send it to you. (you should hav emy email)
How sad. Seriously. I was so looking forward to this game. :(
I don’t know how many games I’ve actually uninstalled over the years, but I can probably count the number on my fingers. Usually, if I’m reinstalling a cherished game, it’s because I’ve upgraded a drive or something.
Downloading the HL2 demo was one of hte stupidest things I’ve ever done. Screw this activation crap. The xbox360 demo, it played like a knock off of Condemned.
Don’t know if its even worth downloading.
Likewise. It sounds like I’ve probably uninstalled more games than mos — I tend to run out of disk space quickly, so I uninstall the ones I’ve finished or don’t think I’ll get around to playing for a while. But still, many games end up never getting uninstalled at all. And I was actually thinking about getting this game (although I was going to download the demo first). But with this news it’s definitely heading towards the “forget about it” pile.
A small fact check:
“you can uninstall and reinstall this game, and if, by chance, you have 2 computers you want to simultaneously play this game on, you also can do that.”
Source:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/more-bioshock-shock/bioshock-pc-+-you-only-install-twice-292222.php
(scroll down to the text in yellow, “Elizabeth from 2k’s reply”)
Of course, her reply is full of “weasel words” and implies that, yes, your install is being tied to a hash generated from your hardware setup.
Despite this slightly kinder policy, I completely agree with you. I’m also a rabid fan of this series and they can keep it.
They already gave.. they will proboly give even more, if this is the case.
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6979
They have raised the number of activations from 2 to 5.
The game has been out for two days now and there is already a crack for it on BitTorrent. I don’t know if it works because I don’t have the game but I find that oh so funny. Why do they even try, I’m sure they spend X amount of dollars paying someone to come up with some form of anti-piracy and then pay someone to code it and etc., just to have it cracked two days later. That’s just like locking your door only keeps out honest people, the real thieves break a window or carry lockpicks.
There were a few cracks (most likely fakes) floating around before the game came out. Most cracks are just for bypassing having the CD/DVD in the drive when you play it; the authentication bit with Bioshock is part of the installer program. Of course, pirates used to write their own installer programs all the time before CD images became more popular (and it let them show off some of their programming talent with all sorts of fancy installers).
As for Bioshock itself, it’s definitely worth picking up even with its goofy activation schemes. I clocked in on it at about 10 hours, start to finish, which is pretty short for a game nowadays, but it certainly has some replayability to it. As for it being scarier than SS2? I don’t think so. Rapture is a lot more actively inhabited (even if those inhabitants are all trying to kill you) than SS2, so you rarely find yourself wondering whether what just made that noise behind you was alive or not. The story is pretty good, if a bit rushed at times especially with its generally cut and dry objectives, and it has a nice little twist at the middle. Unfortunately it seems there’s no way for you to redeem yourself after that, though. If you were a cold-hearted bastard most of the first half, you’re pretty much guaranteed the ‘bad guy’ ending.
They always say that locks keep out honest people.
Shamus, what in your codifing expertise or rather, just opinon in general do you think would be the best way to stop piracy? Surly theres some sort of way.
I think the best way to combat it, would be simple.
You go to store buy game, they give you a reciept for said game. You install it. Done. No need to have disk in drive, none of that BS. The lack of BS causes sales to rise, becuase, well theres no BS, you dont spend money to fight BS and you have a great game, which then people by more of.
But that’s just me.
Copy protection is annoying, yes. But not buying a game because they don’t want people to steal their intellectual property? That’s like going into a jewelry store and refusing to buy any of their stuff because they have security. By the way, you’re missing out on an extremely good game.
I think extending from two to five activations is missing the point.
Boycott.
The best (worst?) part about this is that this terrible DRM is going to do absolutely nothing to pirates. All this is going to do is hurt sales; pirates are either going to pirate the game (and they will, there’s no way Bioshock won’t get cracked soon enough, if it hasn’t been already) or they’re not going to buy it.
Look at Gal Civ II. Massive sales, apparently, and pretty much no copy protection at all unless you count the serial number. What happens if you have hard-drive failure or something? Too bad, I suppose–you’re down to one install. Personally, if I had bought Bioshock and then found this out, I’d probably return it and grab a torrent for it.
Just another example of forcing honest people to wait for the dishonest types to fix a game. I was going to buy this tomorrow. Now I’ll wait until there is a crack. I’ll still buy it, eventually. But not tomorrow, not yet.
I’ll wait for the pirate types to come out with a DRM “patch”.
Wow. I was ranting on this subject at the same time – but I hadn’t heard about the latest development about the “uninstall” not working.
I was gonna buy this game over Steam. I think I might be joining you in your refusal to support a publisher who treats its customers as criminals.
I’m not amused.
I don’t usually say things with such certainty, but I’d bet anything– *anything*!!– that every single developer who put blood sweat and tears into that game would like to see it totally DRM free. Nobody who actually makes games for a living likes DRM because they understand it is useless, clunky, insulting and just plain bad. They don’t want to see it pirated either, but DRM does nothing to prevent that and anyone with an ounce of tech savvy knows it.
So why, then? You get outfits like Wal Mart who won’t stock a game unless it has DRM, and the suits just bow down and take it.
Blame the publisher, blame the publisher. The same people who are trying to erase Irrational’s name from the books of gaming history are the same people who want DRM all over your machine.
You guys should see this too…
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5680
Bioshock doesn’t work with the majority (Or so I got the impression) of video cards out there, for no obvious reason, which have led to 53 pages of disgruntled players on the 2k forums. I myself found this out when I tried to launch the demo, and accusations that this is to screw people over as part of some corporate deal. I don’t know, I couldn’t read it all. :P
A quick comment about Adobe’s activation: they’re wonderful about phone activations. I’ve never spent more than 3 minutes on the phone with them, and the phone techs have always been great. I’ve had to call a number of times because I forgot to deactivate and have never had any problems at all.
“That’s like going into a jewelry store and refusing to buy any of their stuff because they have security.”
No, it’s not. Not in the slightest. Ultimately comparisons to physical property are going to fail miserably because copyright infringement and physical theft are wildly different crimes performed by different people with different tools and different techniques with different victims. This isn’t about security in the jewelry store. This is about the security in the jewelry store following me home after I paid full price for the jewelry, then the store’s security telling who can wear the jewelry I’m paid in full for.
Ultimately if I purchase some cufflinks, a book, or a game, I want to own it. In ten years I should be free to wear or loan out the cufflinks, read or loan out the book, and play or loan out the game, without regards to who created it ten years ago.
(Oh, and Shamus, a “preview” option for comments would be a nice addition to the blog. One never knows what subset of HTML/BBCode/etc works on a given comment system and it’s nice to be able to check.)
Steam has recently removed the 2 installs limit.. which is really not relevant as steam is an online authentication system anyway :0
That’s like going into a jewelry store and refusing to buy any of their stuff because they have security.
More like refusing to buy any of their stuff because they strip-search you on entering and leaving the store, and will only allow you to RENT the jewelry (for the same price as other jewelry stores are letting you BUY theirs), and that you must KEEP coming physically into the shop every month (and being strip-searched) to file a continuation of the rental agreement so they don’t repossess the jewelry.
Guys, this is SOOOOO not a story. Nor is it something to be worked up about. Even if you DO run out of installs (presumably because you forgot or couldn’t uninstall first) the error message that pops up has a phone number to call so you can open your license back up. Big deal.
You know what I hate MORE than that “inconvenience”? Sticks on the side of jewel cases that force me to somehow keep track of where each and everyone is. That to me is inconvenience.
Another thing. Software licenses in the corporate sector have been doing this for years.
And finally, playing this on the 360 completely circumvents this entire non-issue if it is that big of deal to you. In fact the majority of this blogs complaints about the trials and tribulations of PC gaming can be solved outright by adopting console gaming….. I don’t even care which one. Rumor has it Bioshock will be on the PS3 sometime in 2008 anyway.
What now? Did you say rootkit?!
Is Sony (the maker of SecuROM) up to it’s old tricks? Can they seriously NOT have learned from their last debacle? Should SecuROM now properly be pronounced “screw ‘em?”
Well, I looked it over, and I’d have to say technically it’s not a rootkit. It’s just a pain in the ass.
Looks like some ignorant folks have noticed output from sysinternals “Rootkit Revealer,” and assumed it was a rootkit without taking the further step of carefully analyzing the data. I can’t find any rootkit processes.
What there is is a deliberately malformed key in the user tree that can’t be deleted (which ironically warns you not to delete a bunch of later keys that can be deleted) and some files in the Securom cache of your user account that are hacked so they can’t be properly accessed by the user, and therefore can’t be deleted. The files are in %userprofile%\Application Data\SecuROM\UserData.
I would assume the reason why these files are formatted this way is so that your average user won’t wipe out his DRM keys by mistake, especially in light of them only being issued once on install. Frankly, putting it in a hidden directory (UserData) probably went far enough. This is Sony, however. They don’t respect people’s hardware as their own.
If you ran the install as ADMIN, then your admin account is now corrupted with these files.
While it’s using rootkit techniques to do this, it’s not really a rootkit because there’s no active agent running on your machine. A rootkit is defined as hidden software, that can’t be seen by the user processes, which runs beneath user scrutiny by using various tricks available in the Windows OS.
Personally, I’m not happy that I’ve got files that can’t be deleted. What if I decide to create a new user account? I’ve been considering going to the trouble of creating a limited rights account to run from for the enhanced security, but with the same name as my current admin rights user account. Now I can’t properly delete the old account, because it’s corrupted with undeleteable garbage.
Also, it seems I got my dose of the “rootkit” from Neverwinter Nights 2, so this doesn’t just affect Bioshock. All the files in my Securom cache are dated January 10th, which is the day we got back from Christmas vacation (me with a new copy of NWN2, which was more than a little disappointing.) The key has been there for a while as well, long before I installed the Bioshock demo.
So, it looks like SecuROM is now on my boycott list, along with Starforce. I can only hope they are forced to provide tools to remove these files from my machine. Thanks a lot Sony.
Well, here I am in Ubuntu Linux, and the good thing about Linux is it doesn’t have the HOLES the Windows OS does.
I asked it to delete the offending SecuROM files, and it said, “What files?”
I love Linux. ;^)
So, if you want to get rid of these freaking files, you’ll have to mount the NTFS volume with NTFS-3g under Linux, and Linux will gladly take care of them for you.
As for the registry key, I think the only way to deal with that is to export everything you want to from NTUSER.DAT and the %username% folder, blow away the account, and import it all back into a new account.
Or, you could just live with having a regkey labeled “!WARNING! Do not delete” which is completely benign and harmless.
Oh well. I hate Sony.
“Another thing. Software licenses in the corporate sector have been doing this for years.”
So? Why should $49 games have the same security measures that a $3999 modeling package has?
It wouldn’t be so bad if it actually stopped piracy but it simply does not. Games get thrown right up on BitTorrent trackers at or even before release and usually come bundled with a crack or some other way to circumvent the security. It doesn’t stop piracy, it just punishes and annoys legitimate customers.
Ridiculously intrusive copy protection is the biggest reason that I’m primarily a console gamer now. I pay for my games, I certainly don’t pay to have to jump through hoops to install the damned things.
“As for the registry key, I think the only way to deal with that is to export everything you want to from NTUSER.DAT and the %username% folder, blow away the account, and import it all back into a new account.”
Nah. After the rootkit has been removed you should be able to right-click the offending key(s) and change the permissions on it (most likely it just denied the current user access to them — administrators can reset the permissions).
“So, if you want to get rid of these freaking files, you’ll have to mount the NTFS volume with NTFS-3g under Linux, and Linux will gladly take care of them for you.”
Yeah, but that assumes that someone knows enough about Linux to install NTFS-3G in the first place (and has an installation handy). Mighty fine package, though…I’ve gotten quite a bit of use out of it.
And if you want to get rid of registry entries with embedded nulls, (!CAUTION!) the program is here:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Registry-Tweak/RegDelNull.shtml
This is a CLI utility, and it’s very dangerous. It works though. Put a smile on my face.
That is, indeed, sucky. Especially the conflicting information about SecuROM (until otherwise proven, I shall expect it to be a rootkit). But, then, games not living and being playable “forever” is nothing new. I have, on my shelf, a copy (legally bought and all) of Safecracker. Installs fine, but cannot be played, because it immediately bombs out with a “needs more than X MB RAM”. Any day now, I’ll have sufficient patience to take a debugger to it, since I suspect the problem is too much free RAM.
Ian:
There’s no rootkit. SecuROM creates a broken key (with embedded nulls) on install so a poorly informed user will get an error message if they try to wipe out the SecuROM tree. They could otherwise wipe out their key tokens, and not be able to get new ones without a new serial number.
The files are malformed to avoid deletion and examination, but they are key-caches, ostensibly to allow you to run the game without the disc inserted. If one could access them, then one could replicate them on any number of machines, and run the game without the disc on all of them.
None of this indicates a rootkit, and I couldn’t find one. It’s just more sloppily coded DRM. It’s crap, but it’s not nefarious.
(and no, I don’t expect anyone to mount their partition in Linux to fix this, I expect SONY to fix this.)
I think I’m gonna pirate it. Then, if I like it, maybe I’ll buy it, so I have the license. But that disc is never touching my drive. That’s what happens when you punish your customers for giving you money.
Zaghadka: Thanks for the clarification. I should have skimmed through the comments a bit more.
But wow, that is complete and utter crap. SecuROM right now seems worse than StarForce ever was. :/
Wow, that’s horrible. It’s s shame too, as I downloaded the demo for 360 and it was EXTREMELY awesome. Shamus, try to get a hold of someone with a 360 and the game so you can keep your $60, and still experience what is bound to be a really, really good gaming experience.
Since my PC choked on the demo I went for the XBox 360 version anyway (I’d have preferred mouse and keyboard). This sounds like a complete mess though. I would have suggested the Steam route but it appears even that has it on (since Steam is designed for multiple machine use I’d have expected not), I’d hope that, at some stage soon, they are going to remove that restriction.
How long will it take for pirates to break this? I expect little time at all, meanwhile a consumer who just wants to play the game they have bought are getting the shaft. Nice one.