Interestingly, unlike some other notable examples including Dues Ex: Invisible War, 2K Australia cottoned on early that releasing a half-baked console port just wasn't going to cut it. Describing the importance of tailoring the experience, Martin Slater, Lead Programmer at 2K Australia, said, 'If you're thinking about porting to the PC, you're not going to succeed. Look at games like Halo 2 when they came over to the PC - they had exactly the same interface, all the same controller buttons, and they got panned for it.'
He continued, 'PC users are not the same as console [players]. When they cross over in some places, unless you really, really make the game target the PC, you're going to fail in the market and you're going to get panned in the reviews, and panned by the magazines, and panned by the people who play. It's all about just thinking about not considering it just a cheap port.'
Talking of the importance of copy protection in the business decisions, Slater also added, 'Piracy is the biggest problem, and when you're releasing simultaneously on 360 and PC, one of the things in the back of the publishers minds and the people who actually want to make all the money's minds, is, we don't want to lose console sales to people ripping off PC and the piracy issue and if people can get a cheap pirated version on the PC they may not buy the 360 SKU, which is the main SKU.'
Slater also went on to speak about how their copy protection was designed, the importance of DirectX 10 to the average developer, and how they felt about the reactions to their decision to include copyright protection. For the full content of the interview, see PALGN's feature on the BioShock postmortem.
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