2K Games! FSCK YOU! [View All]

[Occulus]

I'm never buying anything from 2K Games again. Never.

:rant:

I recently bought Bioshock (and I'm almost through it! Tonight we may dine on ham and jammies!); my roommate just today bought the Shivering Isles expansion pack for Oblivion. Both games have the 2K Games logo on the box; they are the developer of Bioshock and are also involved with this expansion of Oblivion.

Bioshock is honestly really awesome; it's a bit like a kick in the nuts that lasts. Sadly, it has an undisclosed piece of malware on the DVD called SecuRom. The malware is present to prevent people from making illegal copies of the game. I use the term "malware" for a reason. Keep reading...

"Great," some of you may be thinking, "wonderful. They're taking a proactive step to protect their intellectual property rights." The problem is, while that may be their goal, the presence of SecuRom is undisclosed, both on the box and in the End User License Agreement (EULA). It is never mentioned, and the user gets no option to cancel the install because they've discovered the game uses SecuRom prior to installing it.

As if that were not bad enough, the version of SecuRom they are using takes a hardware fingerprint and sends it off... somewhere, in order to verify the install is genuine, and then downloads a file needed to complete the installation from a 2K server. On top of all this, SecuRom installs itself into the Windows registry- silently- and does not remove itself when BioShock is removed.

The cherry on the sundae? You're only allowed five installs of the game. No, not on five separate computers.

Five installs. Period.

You can ask them nicely for more than that- they themselves raised it due to user complaints... from an original two installs- but there's no guarantee at all they'll give you more, even though they claim to happily do so. I think it was a PC Gamer reviewer that castigated 2K in his review because he couldn't test it on all the hardware he needed to- which involves installing the game many, many times on many, many different PC configurations.

Some users are unable to play the game at all because of SecuRom even weeks after purchase, and another user on 2K's own forums tells of how he was trying to make a drive image to backup his hard disk, and the mere presence of SecuRom on the drive was enough to bring an end to the attempt. SecuRom also doesn't play well with virus scanners (they see it as a system intrusion... hmmm.....) and a utility called Process Explorer, which apparently can be used to find and shut down hidden system processes.

Several users on the 2K forums have filed complaints with the FTC. I'm considering just that myself.

Yesterday, my roommate went out and bought an expansion for Oblivion called "Shivering Isles". Once again, a 2K game, but the original Oblivion DVD doesn't include SecuRom and, somehow, managed to become one of the best PC role playing games ever. "Wonderful," we thought, "since Oblivion has no form of copy protection at all, it stands to reason that expansion game won't, either."

Wrong. Shivering Isles uses.... wait for it.... SecuRom. And get this: it seems to use a version that either doesn't work with Bioshock's version of SecuRom, or is in fact broken outright out of the box. And guess what? SecuRom isn't disclosed on the exterior of this expansion, and- surprise!- causes the expansion pack he bought to be uninstallable. Users on the forums provide several "fixes" which are mildly to hideously technical for the average PC users (things like making a .iso from a DVD and mounting it on a virtual drive aren't things average users often learn how to do). 2K quite literally stole my roommate's cash, and as he is on a fixed income he is not amused. I'm helping him to try and get it to even install, but the sad irony here is that to do so I'm probably going to have to technically break the law... to use a legitimately purchased product.

An even sadder irony is, those who completely broke the law and downloaded cracked pirate copies of both Bioshock and the Oblivion expansion aren't having any of these issues because cracked copies, by definition, strip the copy protections from the install process. Had we "stolen" the Oblivion expansion, my roommate wouldn't be out $20. Triple that for me if I had downloaded Bioshock instead of paying for it with my hard-earned cash- even though I myself had no problems with that game.

I don't think I'll be buying any games from 2K ever again. This is twice now that I've seen them install undisclosed third-party software that is known to cause problems, they are not providing a remove tool, SecuRom is uncooperative on the subject of removing their software (i.e., once it's there, it's there)...

We need to make this shit illegal. the only people being hurt are the legitimate, paying customers. When it takes about a week for a cracked copy to appear, one wonders if the prices would be lower if they didn't pay for the SecuRom license in the first place. I know if my roommate had broken the law instead of being a paying customer, he'd have a working copy instead of a $20 coaster.

:rant: