The tug-of-war that is software pirates versus publishers had been relatively quiet in the months leading up to the release of Bioshock, the much anticipated action-RPG that has, since birth, been called “the spiritual successor to System Shock 2”, the game in which – ironically enough given the present day predicament – a computer goes a bit bonkers and starts screwing everybody’s lives up.

We’ve seen it all over the years, from games asking you to quote random verses of the manual through to Bioshock’s rather iTunes-like method of protecting itself from thieves: When the game finally makes it home safe you’re not allowed install it on more than two computers and each machine is limited to three reinstalls, forever.

The publishers, 2K Games, didn’t do much for themselves when their tech support bounced gamers from rep to rep to rep seemingly with no real idea what they were going to do to rectify the problem. Eventually 2K got themselves organised and devised a 5 by 5 plan. They upped the number of machine installs to five and the number for reinstalls on each PC from three to five. Better, probably adequate for most peoples needs… But still, when you’ve plonked down your not insubstantial amount of money for the game, it’s no fun to have to scratch a notch in the box with each install.

Gamers have been bemoaning this limitation and draconian style of copy protection quite loudly, but as with all arguments there are two sides. On the one hand, you pay for your game and you shouldn’t be persecuted as if you were a pirate. On the other hand, publishers invest significant amounts of money into video games, and the margins involved are not all that astronomically high. Let’s not kid ourselves here – every day, thousands of titles are downloaded, and while you can argue to high heaven how many downloads actually equals a lost sale for publishers, you can’t tell me that 100,000 downloads of a game isn’t a few pennies lost for companies like 2K.

It’s the Catch-22 of gaming: If I pay for a game I don’t want copy protection, yet if there is no copy protection then it will be easier for the game to be pirated in the short term (and game publishers make their money in the first few months; no copy protection lasts forever, but long enough to break even is long enough.)

When the Bioshock issue came to light, 2K was relatively quick to relent and change to its 5 by 5 solution. They’ve seen what can happen when Joe Gamer becomes unhappy with the DRM setup: This has happened before. A cynical person might say that 2K deliberately left Bioshock’s DRM system very, very tight so that when they “loosened” it to a tight system, we’d think that 5 by 5 is a much better proposition.