What to do about pirates...how about upset the community and destroy your sales!!!

GG, 2k Games.

Your mega-super-would-be-blockbuster FPS release of Bioshock, one of the most revolutionary games to hit the market in years, is now tainted, and you are losing sales.

In case you hadn't heard, Bioshock, the next big shooter, released on Tuesday of this week. This game was projected to completely explode in the industry because it was an increbile game. Open story line, customizable experience, so on and so forth. Well, 2k Games has decided they'd rather not sell the game than have it pirated, because they have a nasty DRM that must be installed with the game. Now, DRM is fine if it works, but this DRM installs a rootkit into your system allowing the company that owns the DRM access to your PC at any time. So basically, yes you can install the game and play it, you just have to let SecuROM(the DRM company) have full access through a backdoor to your machine.

How do we know this is a rootkit? Primarily because almost every virus scanner in the world goes nuts when you try to install it, calling it a rootkit or trojan and trying to delete it. Needless to say, you have to fully disable almost all of your security software to install or uninstall this game. Sound fishy? I think so too. 2k is claiming that this isn't a rootkit and is just a simple DRM measure, well Steam(an online content delivery service run by Valve, creators or Half-Life) is a DRM measure and it doesn't require me deactivating my firewall/anti-virus to install games. By the way, there are many other issues involving the DRM as well. You can only install the game twice using the CD key before it forces you to buy another copy. So on and so forth...

Long story short, 2k was worried about piracy, so they made this DRM to cut down on piracy. Instead, they are alienating legit customers and Bioshock games are being returned, or never purchased. I know I was going to get the game on Tuesday when it came out, but now, I won't be purchasing this virus and backdoor hack of a software product. I also had my roommate in a frenzy about the game, he too was going purchase the game, now, he is not. That's $100 lost already, by just 1 household. Multiply that buy the thousands of copies that aren't going to be bought b/c people don't want backdoor hacks on their machines, that number is going to be significant. So, GG 2k, you've sacrificed your sales by preventing piracy. But oh wait, your precious DRM has already been cracked and there are pirated versions of Bioshock circulating the internet. One site reported that a torrent had been downloaded over 300,000 times. That's potential customers down the drain. By the way, if 300,000 copies of Bioshock were purchased, that would equate to $15,000,000 in revenue.

The thing that is the killer in all this, is that 2k could get most, if not all of their lost revenues back by simply saying, "Ok, we goofed, bye bye rootkit software." I know I'd be first in line to get Bioshock if they did that.