Dear Ken Levine and the rest of the uber cool BioShock crew,

i am a long time PC gamer who has been waiting in anticipation for BioShock ever since it was announced. Since i reside in Bombay, India, quality PC hardware is hard to come by and is wallet rapingly expensive. However i managed to scrimp and save a few months of salaries to get a semi-decent rig up and running for this game. After all, with all the glowing previews and reviews comparing it to my two favorite titles of all time, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 definitely made it a must play.

Now add to the fact that i usually have to wait a good month or two to get the game due to a craptacular release schedule, i decided to risk a preorder with one of the many ready and willing import stores around the city. So not only do i pay more for hardware, but end up paying two to three times more the usual price for the Collectors Edition which will NEVER release here. But hey, it's for the love of the game, right?

Also the Xbox 360 version is as useful as dialogues in a porn movie (due to crazy red lights of death issues) and it costs an arm, a leg , kidneys and a few assorted body parts, i decided (or rather common sense did) not to get an Xbox 360. Besides Microsoft's customer support is quite pathetic here.

As you can see acquiring the means to game in a country like India isn't as easy as it is in the US or UK. We pay 4 to 5 times more on hardware, put up with shitty release schedules and have to resort to grey market imports for CEs that cost more and roam freely in your markets. But we do it anyway because well, we love games.

Instead of pirating a game i rather give the developers their due, after all it's the least i can do for such an awesome work of art.

But when you stuff rootkits down our throats, after all it takes to get things in place to play this masterpiece, everything seems so futile and useless. It seems that you guys have taken the PC crowd for granted.

i agree that you need to protect your interests, but this is not the way to go about it. i'm in half a mind to cancel my preorder and take a walk down the street where i can get the game for 2$. i pay for my games, i deserve to install it without any PC crashing rootkits or limits on the number of PCs i can install it on.

Have you no confidence in your product that you'd have to resort to such idiotic measures? After close to a month of cock teasing in the form of glowing reviews and impressions, that last thing i want is my anti-virus getting menopausal on me. Your attitude reeks of insecurity. It's bad enough to get gimped widescreen support and release one working version of the game (for the xbox 360).

Contrary to popular belief, even though people in countries like mine love to pirate, there is a small, vocal , growing section of gamers who believe in giving the developers their due. Considering that we're at such a nascent stage and the fact that we'd know about such draconian piracy prevention techniques in an instant, leaves most of us, if not all, with more reason to pay $2 over $50.

So please fix this pathetic excuse for copy protection immediately, lest the neighborhood pirate makes a profit over the people who deserve to. You.

Just another gamer,

.h3lios