PC Game Fun Time

Odds are we all hate Digital Restrictions Management. Everyone has either been bitten by it either on games they’ve legitimately purchased (I know I have), or knows someone who was. Even pirates hate DRM because it requires 30 seconds of inconvenience to copy a cracked executable over the installed one (if any sarcasm over the “hassle” DRM creates for pirates versus the hassle it creates for paying customers is showing, please disregard it). But 2K Sports, bless them, has managed to invent out of whole cloth a folly even worse than DRM: serial code activation in a game that doesn’t ship with serial codes.

Presumably they meant to include serial codes in the boxed copies of NBA 2K9 for PC; it’s just that somewhere along the line of communication between headquarters and the packaging factory, that (possibly important) instruction was lost. Yes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and 2K Sports is now partially to blame. So if you bought NBA 2K9 for PC and tried to install it, you’d be the software installation equivalent of all dressed up with nowhere to go. Along with everyone else. It’s the same feeling as when you’re left wondering “Where’s the NFO file?”, except you’re out fifty bucks for the privilege.

2K Sports did manage to get on the ball really quickly and released a patch that is automatically downloaded during installation that removes the serial number activation. So anyone attempting to install the game now will never realize anything is amiss. Unless they aren’t connected to the Internet during the attempted installation. And unless they try it at some point in the future.

Just like with DRM, there’s another hidden folly inherent in this “solution”: what happens when the patch server goes offline? The server 2K Sports is using to support this game won’t be around indefinitely. Heck, the company won’t survive forever. Yet there are still people who get a retro gaming kick from playing PC games that are two decades old right at this very moment. Had those games used such an incompetent verification scheme during installation, you wouldn’t be able to play them today. 2K Sports owes it to posterity to release at least one good serial number for people twenty years down the line to be able to use to play the game, if that’s what they want to do.

But let’s be honest: Who in the hell plays sports games on PC?! I didn’t even realize anyone bothered publishing them. Is there any greater disparity between console gamers and PC gamers than the relative affections for sports games? Sports games on the PC seem so antithetical to the hardcore PC gaming crowd I know it’d be like rick-rolling a Black Panther rally — though that is something I’d actually like to see.