I read this thread last night, Bought the game today. I`m glad I did, It just reek`s of quality. I`m not very far into it, The intro and beginning of the game are amazing. The sound quality in paticular is incredible. I`m also very happy that I can "feel" the System Shock heritage in this game.

Should be, "One small step for gaming, one massive step for companies."

When will games companies get it through their collective heads that any kids of DRM and/or copy protection on games only does one thing. Piss off your customers and causes a reduction in sales.

The pirates will always find a way to hack out your copy protection and activation routines and play it anyway. Anyone intent on getting a game for free will do so, no matter the level of copy protection or DRM.

Please recognise this before you drive away ALL of your paying customers by using draconian measures that just make it difficult for paying customers to enjoy their purchase as they wish.

I would be more willing to buy games tied to online services if this was an actual part of license agreement.

This is great news. I love Bioshock and the fact that 2K is now removing restrictions is a step in the right direction and I hope that this is the conduct for future games from 2K and other companies.

Hmm. lets recap.

1. Release game for XBOX 360
2. Wait a year, but announce game for PC meanwhile
3. Announce game will have a very restrictive DRM to get a lot of negative 'buzz' around the game.
4. Release game
5. Wonder why the game flops at retail?
6. Remove DRM
7. Notice that the game does not suddenly become a best seller
8. Decide that DRM had no impact on lack of sales, and blame pirates.
9. Release next game on console

Pretty sure Bioshock didn't flop. Also, they were intended to be release on PC and XBox at the same time but were something like 3 weeks apart due to a retailer mistake. And by all accounts the PC version was better graphics, better controls and less buggy.

Can someone help me with the implications of this?

Bioshock was a game I avoided buying because of all the negative buzz from the DRM used, the same reason I won't be buying Spore unless I know my fears are unfounded or things change. There's plenty of games out there that I can be picky about games that run with this kind of restrictive activation system. But Bioshock is like £12 in some shops now and it got good reviews so...
So what does this mean if I buy Bioshock now? The SecuROM will still be installed then so what does this mean for my PC? Should I still be worried about having this on my PC? Is there any 'spying' going on with SecuROM? I've heard nightmare tales of it breaking other non related things on people's PC.

Please quel my fears or point me in the direction of the information I need.
TIA.

Don't buy BioShock. It's not just about DRM, it's about design. They stole every single feature from somewhere else, and sewn them all together into a ridiculous Frankenstein game. The entire storyline is presented as a bunch of tape recorders scattered throughout the city. You shoot waves of mutant zombies... I mean, splicers, collect the tape recorders, shoot splicers, collect, shoot, collect, shoot...

You can't die. You can't die even symbolic death.

Everything that requires user interface is handled through vending machines. Some of them work once and don't take any money. Some of them are used to simply change your bio-upgrades - for free!

Ah, the plasmids. You stick a needle in your vein, wait 2 seconds, and your hand transforms into HL2 gravity gun. You do that couple more times, and you can use the awesome power of bioengineering to set stuff of fire using pyrokinesis.

Doesn't sound stupid enough? Come to the nearest device and "hack" it solving a meaningless puzzle, while the main game waits for you on pause. Do it again, and again and again.

It's one of those games that spit on common sense to achieve a bit of dumbed-down "fun".

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Did I mention SecuROM broke my DVD driver?

Oh brother.

Ignoring the senseless rant abouve: the main criticism with the Bioshock DRM was the limited installs. It would lock you out after 3 installs on 2 computers originally, and uninstalling it didn't remove one of those counts, so people would install on 2 computers, then uninstall it to put in on another only to find that they couldn't. The SecuRom business was that it got flagged as Spyware by some anti-virus stuff and you couldn't easly remove from your registry, but I don't recall any actually 'spying' going on as such. Apparently it 'broke' some people's DVDs drives as above, but from what I could garner many people got on with it fine. Many people are getting on with Mass Effect fine on the PC, even though it has much the same DRM, so that would lead me to think it simply it was exagerrated consumer outrage that put it in under such scrutiny - this time everyone's fallen for the EA two-step pretty quietly and I haven't heard very much about broken DVD drives etc.

I bought the game, but won't be buying Mass Effect due to the DRM restrictions (I didn't realise this was the case when buying Bioshock). But seeing as they have lifted I think at £12 it's a great game at a good price. I just depends if you're funny about having to put your disc in to play it (some people get really pissy about that) and how much of a 'stand' you want to make against DRM.

Just because a disc has strange copy protection methods on it that prevent some drives from even reading it doesn't mean the drive is broken (especially as you count only two such protected discs as evidence, and make no mention of how it handles others).

Finally. I just traded in my 360 version and now I will buy the PC one. Yes!

Bioshock's activation scheme has been removed? Too little, too late. It's still got Securom on it. This is a shame too, because I was going to buy Bioshock a few months ago had this DRM not been present (toss up, Bioshock or another game -- I picked the other game). Now it's no longer an appealing game. The same will likely happen to Mass Effect, which I still refuse to buy due to the DRM.

I have to point out, after reading this, that it is entirely possible for DRM to physically break drives. I seem to recall Sim City 3000 Unlimited had Securom on it which kept continuously accessing the disk and made for one nasty install and game-startup sequence as the DRM kicked in. An older computer of mine lost a CD burner right in the middle of starting that game. In another system, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 wiped out its DVD burner because of the Securom checking constantly while building at night (a known glitch that took 3 months to half-way fix (it persists today), unless you downloaded cracks). Both drives were under warranty, but the timing and nature of the accesses when the drives failed cannot simply be coincidental.

I said driver (software), not drive (hardware). It could read other DVDs just fine. That's the point, though.

It was not merely a hardware issue, since WiC would only launch with the original DVD in the drive, even though the system (file explorer) couldn't see contents of the disk. Since the same problem happened with 2 SecuROM disks, and there are accounts of people having the same problem with other SecuROMed titles, it's very unlikely the problem is due to something else.

Too little too late - I might have bought it if it didn't have the DRM, but now I have moved on to Sins!!!