Strict PC piracy measures here to stay: 2K Australia

By Randolph Ramsay, GameSpot AUPosted Nov 21, 2007 9:48 pm PT

2K Australia's Martin Slater acknowledges gamer anger at PC install requirements for BioShock.

2K's BioShock has been one of this year's most well-received games by both critics and fans, but many PC gamers were angered by the game's lengthy install process, which required users to download files from 2K's servers for the game to initially run. At launch, 2K's patch servers seemed to have a tough time, in that they went down for several hours when eager gamers tried to install their copies.

At the recent Games Connect Asia Pacific conference held in Melbourne, Australia, 2K Australia senior programmer PC team Martin Slater acknowledged that the company received plenty of flak at launch. In a keynote speech that covered 2K Australia's work on BioShock, Slater said that though the company won't be implementing the same launch install-patch strategy for future games, it would do something "similar" because piracy remains one of the biggest problems for PC games.

"When you're releasing simultaneously on the 360 and the PC, one of the things in the back of the publishers' minds and the people who want to make all the money is that we don't want to lose console sales to people ripping off the PC and the piracy issue. If they can get a cheap pirated version on PC, they may not buy the 360 SKU, which is probably your main SKU," he said.

"We went to great lengths to avoid the piracy issue. We had downloadable .EXE, we didn't ship with the actual executable on DVD. We were trying to avoid production DVDs going walkies between the manufacturing process and actually turning up on shelves. You find with a lot of games, what happens is that anywhere between manufacturing and the stores, one of these DVDS will go walkies and end up in the hands of crackers. These crackers are trying to make the day-one crack--the kudos comes in cracking the game before its release. So we went to huge lengths to avoid this.

"We achieved our goals. We were uncracked for 13 whole days. We were happy with it. But we just got slammed. Everybody hated us for it. It was unbelievable.

"It's a complex issue in the PC world, and it's something we need to actively address. It's a really hard question. As a company we need to maximise our sales so we can keep making games. I don't think we'll do what we've done before. There are other issues with downloading an executable. There is a lot of strain on our content-delivery servers and things like that, where everyone has to download a 10MB executable. I don't think we'll do exactly the same thing again, but we'll do something close. You can't afford to be cracked. As soon as you're gone, you're gone, and your sales drop astronomically if you've got a day-one crack."

106 Comments

  • rockdawg

    Posted Nov 27, 2007 7:02 pm PT

    I think what they mean is that Securom and the possibility of connecting to a server to validate an install aren't going anywhere. But, downloading executables and having a limited number of installs might be a thing of the past.

    I think the whole purpose is to buy time before the game is cracked and in widespread use. I don't know how it works in games, but the majority of sales for a new release DVD take place in the first week. I'd imagine games are similar.

  • wwonka666

    Posted Nov 27, 2007 2:50 pm PT

    2K/Rockstar breaking the law, now that's funny. Now following a law, that would be nice.

  • gbrading Site moderator

    Posted Nov 26, 2007 5:05 pm PT

    Whilst I am not at all against protecting games against piracy, what I am against is the installation restrictions imposed by SecuROM. Originally, you could only install the game a limited numbe of times, I'm yet to know if this has changed. For someone who has actually bought the game, the publisher has no right whatsoever to limit or restrict the use of the product by the consumer. Anyone who has legally bought anything is within perfect right to install it on as many machines, as many times as they wish, so at the moment, 2K is breaking the law.

  • DarkGord

    Posted Nov 26, 2007 4:54 pm PT

    If someone is going to play a pirated game, would it matter to him if he got to play it on release day or 2 weeks later?
    And wasn't the 360 version pirated before release? But anyway thanks for the heads up, Bioshock was the last 2K game i ever bought. I also made sure i will be able to install and play it after your foreseeable bankruptcy and your servers going down!

  • kainen666

    Posted Nov 26, 2007 4:16 pm PT

    scene groups will always find a way around the protection.

    its a game in itself, shame but true

  • Zennious

    Posted Nov 26, 2007 5:33 am PT

    "All they did, using this messed up "protection, was to shoot themself in the kneecap. What ? You'll be doing something similar with the next release ? There goes your second kneecap. Unless you are a spider, you are now totally crippled and useless."

    Probably my favorite quote I have ever read on this website.

  • bloody-hell

    Posted Nov 25, 2007 10:59 pm PT

    All they did, using this messed up "protection, was to shoot themself in the kneecap. What ? You'll be doing something similar with the next release ? There goes your second kneecap. Unless you are a spider, you are now totally crippled and useless. Translated to Business-speak : You will go down and disappear from the market.

    Bought releases that cost me more pain to get them running are simply not being bought in the first place. 13 days you say ? I'm no release-day-buyer either, so I'm usually waiting a week or two anyways and by then it's clear of which way to go to get the game (or not).

    Learn from your mistakes. Either you build yourself up a trusting community willing to buy almost everything, or you piss them off by screwing up installers and copy protection.
    It's how it is with software, it WILL be cracked, no matter how complicated the "protection" is.

    The most user friendly "protection" currently is to make the user enter his serial number on some of the company's license servers in order to get "extra" content (be it patches, add-ons, fixes, new content, etc.) and leaving the game totally protection free, even better, don't even make the user put in the CD when running the game.

  • jazilla

    Posted Nov 25, 2007 4:35 pm PT

    Pirating games is like stealing people's art. It's awful. If you pirate games, you should stop.

  • taurian0205

    Posted Nov 25, 2007 2:31 pm PT

    hmm...thats kinda gay for a single player game....i mean really? they exagerated after all the hypes about bioshock - i admit i liked the game but then after i watched the spoiler, nehh dont wanna play it anymore, lol, kinda spooky, anyway, single player games shouldnt be all that pirate proof.... its too advance for us hardcore gamers

  • stikves

    Posted Nov 24, 2007 1:09 am PT

    Come on 2K, you're losing too much bussiness! Even though I liked the demo very much, I did not buy the game until it was %50 off in holiday sales. Why? If I'm not getting a "full" product, I do not wish to give the full price anyway.

    (Actually I've even thought about pirating it too. Extra activation on Steam? -- Totally unacceptable. Learn from Valve while using their platform. I'm very lucky that I've read comments before jumping on it on Steam assuming it would not have SecuROM).

  • lamprey263

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 3:31 pm PT

    Piracy will never stop.

  • Vulpis

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 2:42 pm PT

    First thing the game companies need to learn--make a game *worth* the price you're demanding for it, and more people will be willing to pay for it rather than getting pirate copies.

    Otherwise, you just end up in a rather vicious cycle of overpriced game, people pirate, company adds more anti-piracy measures (which increase the price even *more* as the company tries to recoup the cost of developing/licensing the antipiracy method(s) ), even *more* people pirate because of the inflated price, wash, rinse, repeat...

    As has been pointed out, games with no copy-protection at all have done just as well as any other games, if not better....though at least in part was because they were *good* games, and you got what you paid for them.

  • p00phead

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 12:11 pm PT

    cracked versions are for cheap people why dont you use steam its cheap as on it

  • lostn

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 11:57 am PT

    13 days, whatever. My mate was playing the Xbox 360 version still, before that one released. He beat the game before the review went up.

  • pidow

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 11:12 am PT

    Look, keep the BAD guy's out , thats all well and good and needed, but put the rest of us th-ru the ringer is not a good thing.

  • Royas

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 9:14 am PT

    "there were cracked versions out there within three days of Bioshock's retail release"
    "This is simply not true. The first attempted crack came out 3 days after release, but it didn't actually work. The first working crack came out 10 days after release. And the first proper scene crack came out a full month after release."

    Then, I have at least 2 friends who were playing unworking cracks within the first week of release. My mistake, I assumed that since they were shooting things up, that the crack was working. Must have been a group hallucination or something.

  • Poshkidney

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 8:50 am PT

    if they are worried about the pirates they should go breaking down doors and breaking skulls.

  • Konfusion

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 7:35 am PT

    This is dumb. The pirates cracked the game nonetheless -- all they're doing with these measures is annoy the honest buyers. When will they learn? I even know people who DIDN'T buy the game because of the annoying protection. Way to go? I think not!

  • greater_bird

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 6:09 am PT

    If people had known in advance that Bio Shock had this sort of protection on it, there would have been a lot less people buying it and using illegal copies instead. If you make it harder for people to easily use the product they buy, then they're much more inclined to use cracked versions to avoid the fuss. Plus, this sort of reputation will follow on to the next game they bring out. They did themselves no favours with this install idiocy, and I'm stunned they were so naive to think that their customers wouldn't hate them for it.

    Galactic Civilizations 2 has done fantastically with no copy protection on it at all, because they offer continuing support and content additions to people who can register (ie. have a legal key for the game). By contrast, Bio Shock has done well despite its protection - if it were a mediocre game, people would have returned it in droves, claiming the install wouldn't work.

  • rivertrolls

    Posted Nov 23, 2007 4:43 am PT

    One day all the games producers will get together with Msoft and make a program that if it has a cracked/hacked program on windows, will disable your computer and you need to pay **** loads to get out of it.
    This will prob not come to PC anytime soon, but look at the IPhone, 360 and PS3, the IPhone blocked ALL cracked phones from working, 360 bans you from xboxlive and PS3 ban your console and your phone number you use to dial the servers if you break code of conduct. Msoft even had the patch in windows XP with the annoying pop-ups that came up all the dam time if you didn't have lagit windows.

    End of the day games companys have a right to protect themselves, its like you baking a cake for 3 years, and it'll be a dam awesome cake i bet, and then someone walking in and having a slice, i bet you'd be dam p***ed

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