From the 2k Forum:
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=191631&postcount=2347
A guy tries to get Bioshock to run under a different user on the same computer. It doesn’t work. 2k says “haha, too bad, you have to buy another copy, because…”
Ken, you’re a great guy that made a great game.
Please quit 2K and take your entire development team somewhere else and let the soulless corporation rot.
At what point does the hassle of dealing with DRM and the PR hit that draconian DRM creates eclipse the minor (minor!) decrease in piracy?
Seriously.
Wow. That’s pretty draconian. One user per license, not one machine per license?
I really thought that there was no lower level that this could go…
This is why you don’t allow peons to publicly post in the forums. Now 2K will have to say that “JT” was talking out his ass on his own, and actually fix the problem instead of just offering a kludgy workaround (login as your brother).
This really feels like too much bs 2k is pulling off for one game, I can’t seem to think why 2k would go thru all this for Bioshock, and not for a game like Civ4, considering the Civ brand is bigger. I’m done with 2k for now, way too many idiotic decisions they’ve made to keep me as a customer.
You make purchasing decisions based on the publisher, and not based on the quality of an individual game?
Because before users in windows, no one shared computers.
this is a stupid limitation to be sure, but meh, yet another thing people are complaining about in bioshock that just hasn’t vaguely affected me. I’m a bit bored with the game now tbh, but easily got my moneysworth.
I would expect they fix this very quickly.
wow, am I ever glad I bought the Steam version…
Are you familiar with “First they came for the Communists…” ?
No, based on both the quality of the game and the hassles required to run it.
I’m curious why this is an issue at all. Can’t they just share a login? Honestly, nobody has screamed at Microsoft for this same sort of practice on Xbox Live. You have to buy another Live account to have a second gamertag rather than letting you use one account (provided only one person is signed in at a time) with a few extra gamertags to provide a break for a family. I know my wife and I had a battle over what our gamertag was going to be, because she didn’t want everyone reading a guy’s name and then, upon hearing her voice, thinking she was a ten year old boy. We had to settle for a unisex gamertag in the end, and it’s a pretty lame one, at that.
Anyway, my point is that this seems a whole lot of hoopla for nothing, really. Just let your brother use your login…where’s the harm in that? Heck, another good solution is to create a Games account. That way, you can even streamline the loading processes to minimize bloat you don’t need running when you’re gaming AND you solve this “problem” of needing to buy another copy of a game. Silly, silly, silly.
That’s true, but if your bride wants to play your copy of Bioshock, and keep her own Bioshock saves, and have her own Bioshock achievements, she can. Having two gamertags is obvious: don’t you and your bride play games with each other?
It seems some PC users really got scoobied with this title.
Well, gamertags are free, you dont need to pay to have 10000 people playing bioshock on one xbox.
Not really. She’s very anti-single player, I’m very pro-single player. She’s very FPS multplayer mayhem insanity, I’m very story/narrative driven, etc…
All that aside, though, the PC version doesn’t have achievements, so that’s out. The have your own saves things is a valid point, but as I said, my wife and I share one gamertag on Xbox Live and, consequently, we shared the saved game list. It wasn’t very hard to know which save was mine and which was hers, after all.
I just don’t see the big deal, but I conceed that I’m probably missing the point entirely. As an interesting side note, my wife (with her aversion to anything single player and story driven) completely fell in love with Bioshock. She never, ever, under any circumstances replays a game. She may, every blue moon, play a single player game if she’s bored with her multiplayer FPS running and gunning, but it’s not likely she’ll even finish the game, much less play it again. However, with Bioshock, she not only completed it, she’s playing it again and refuses to surrender the Xbox to me.*
*This is made even more amazing by the fact that she’s, for the most part, ignoring the Call of Duty 4 beta in favor of playing more Bioshock.
Could it be because, in practice, BioShock plays like a multiplayer running and gunning FPS with no story?
Not rhetorical, actually asking.
The difference is that Xbox Live is not a PC. Games have, over the entire course of recorded computer history, allowed multiple users to play them without issue. The physical disk was the restraint, and the implication that one game = one computer. How many users are on that computer should absolutely be irrelevant.
On the 360, it’s a controlled microcosm. Microsoft sets the rules and you live by those rules because you have nothing to compare against. You don’t have “how the xbox used to work”.
This is way, way over the line. I don’t even have a sibling and I can see that.
There is also the issue of proper use of Windows (or any OS really). You should not be running your daily stuff in the Admin account, but you need to install in the Admin account.