I dont know of any way to get the DVD to work. You can try to install it through steam on another computer and then copy it and steam over after setting steam to offline mode.

🤣, guess they still haven't fixed or offered the game for free as they should if they aren't going to fix it. Guess someone needs to bitch on Twitter. Won't be me since I don't use that shit.

See here for your retail copy:
BioShock retail cannot connect to download server

Install game but leave installer open before it tries to download.
Backup the game directory since the install directory will be deleted
Download the exe from the link and copy to game directory and install the game patch if you want to keep the copy protection for some reason.
Download a cracked exe if you don't. Should be 9,700 KB.

As for buying it on Steam I don't see any point of giving these idiots more money for something you already bought I seem to be in the minority on that but there is that option.
The Steam version will run on XP but you'll need to use a cracked executable or the old version of Steam that runs on XP if you want to use Steam for some reason. SSE might work but no point in using that since a cracked executable is prefered for BioShock.

The Remasters require at least Vista and require SSE or Goldberg if you don't want to use Steam.

JayAlien wrote on 2020-03-03, 21:35:

Steam no longer runs on XP (irrelevant as my XP PC is not connected to the web)

https://archive.org/details/steam_201901

Thanks all for the info, I'll try out some of these suggestions when I have some time at the weekend.
J

Thats the future of gaming, if a company is gone you can no longer use your purchased software products with out piracy.

welcome to brave new world.

i`m really interested how this will affect xbox one for example if they shut off services some day.

So I got a little further, I extracted the .gz file and placed the bioshock.exe in the folder. When I run this, I'm now prompted for my serial number, but it's telling me it's incorrect. I'm not sure if this is still trying to ping the 2k servers at this point.

Does Bioshock 2 (boxed retail) suffer from the same broken DRM?

Retail
IIRC, Bioshock 2 just used SecuROM for a disc check. You can use the Razor 1911 crack for that.

Steam
Use SmartSteamEmu

Steam
Bioshock 2 Remastered - Use SmartSteamEmu or Goldberg