News BioShock copy protection to go?

So you've broken the licence agreement, its then up to them to chase you down legally not to damage or modifiy your computer. Companies have to do a bit of risk assessment and factor in that some people will not buy their product, they will steal it, and realise that not every download will be a sale and not every person using their software would be a sale. Personally i wish people would start only using software they've paid for, it would do one of two things, drop the price or drive up the usage of open source software which would benefit every one.

 

There wouldn't have been SecuROM in Rapture....

 

Actually, that's not true. Objectivism places no restrictions on a business, they can do as they please within the law. But in an objectivist paradise no-one would buy such a product.

 

...opening up the dizzying prospect of games within games, as first toyed with in Doom 3...

 

Was gonna say we can do that now, but then I suppose any company would be free to make an exact copy of the game without the copy protection? Therefore that company would get the sales while the other loses out.

 

Greetings!

Uh-oh...
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8703

 

I don't believe Rand did much on copyright, it was a fairly new industry when she did the bulk of her writing, and not something she covered in any of the works I've read by her. But chances are that the idealised Objectivist paradise would include some extremely stringent "intellectual property" laws and that, in fact, no-one would be free to copy anything.

 

Ha ha! And Big Brother spake, and lo, the issue did close.

 

Read that whole thread last night... I don't think the guy knows everything there is to know - he's making a lot of assumptions.

 

Opened up first, to my knowledge, in Day of The Tentacle actually. If you used Cousin Eds PC as Bernard then you could access the whole of Maniac Mansion, the prequel to DOTT and play through the original full game.

Of course, doubtless there were game-in-game things in RPGs long before that. Its hard to think of a decent RPG which doesn't feature a gambling sub-game at some point.

 

Ah not so fast Mr. Martin. In DOTT, when you accessed Ed's PC, all it really did was shut down DOTT and load up Maniac Mansion. IIRC, there was no way back from Maniac Mansion to DOTT, you had to reload a saved game, hardly a game within a game. And those old RPG's gambling games weren't exactly seperate games either, just mini games really, of which huge numbers of games had.

Running the original Doom on a monitor inside a level in the Doom 3 engine... now that really is a game within a game.

 

Ok, what about Shemue? In the arcades in that you could play loads of games on the arcade system there.

 

PGR3 has Geometry wars in it.

The next Geometry wars will be in PGR4

 

AHA! An even better example:

System Shock 2; it had the PiG gameboy thing which you used to hack things with and which you could play games on, like Overworld Zero, an RPG on which you could save progress etc.

Also, the Lander game on the PDA in The Dig. That was good too.

 

PGR2 had geometry wars, PGR3 had Geometry wars: retro Evolved demo

 

PGR3 had the whole game in it

 

And the activation is cracked!

 

although it's cracked, i am still very happy that i bought it, supported the developer. this game is truly amazing. worth every penny

 

I agree, I own the collector's edition - my big daddy figurine rocks.

 

Yeah, i had a look at the activation crack. Either someone is an idiot, and gave away their own activated paul.dll, bioshock.exe and securom registry keys, or they figured out how these keys (they're LOOOONG) interact with these two files, and as such, produced a compliant pair.