I know perfectly well what a license is, thanks. I also know perfectly well that these restrictions are aimed at trying to prevent resale, and are nothing to do with piracy.

You appear to be more accepting of losing a degree of control over a product you've paid for. Fortunately, the people who don't want to roll over kicked up such a fuss over EA's limited activation games in 2008 that the company came to its senses and stopped it. Hopefully, 2K will get the message that this crap is not wanted and unnecessary.

Look at those two bolded points-- you don't fully understand what a license is.

Again, you are not paying for the game, you are paying for the use of the game and up to 15 installs.  That is what you paid for.  You did not pay for something that once you buy, you get it forever.

When you get a disc or download of assetts, you are not paying for those assetts, you're paying for use of those assetts and in this case a limited use.  You are getting exactly what you paid for.

I know I am, I also know it's not what I want and it's inferior to the licensing terms of other games, hence the losing degree of control comment, which you are, relatively speaking. Apologies for not spelling everything out for you, I mistakenly over-estimated your comprehension skills.

Anyway, to get away from this sudden outbreak of thread-derailing, nit-picking pedantry, some good news- the SecuROM 5 machine activation limit will not be applied to the Steam version, which makes it more palatable.

You can get pissy all you want, I'm not the one that misunderstood how the license works. 

And saying that it's inferior to something else is another case and doesn't really matter.  The point in this case is that you get exactly what you pay for-- 15 installs.  If you don't like that, don't buy the product.  It's a concept that could not be simpler.

this really sucks...alot

is there a chance that somewhere down the line that they might remove it?

Do they give you access to the license before you buy the product? Are all the terms written on the box, or do you have to buy it before you know how buttfucked you will be by their new licensing trick of the day?

double post

Looks like I will be pirating the game rather than buying it.

To bolded: You're right, it's not the best solution at all, it's the worst solution as it just annoys you're customers and makes the pirated version a more attractive deal as it has less limitations than the genuine retail copy. It annoyed me before when someone posted on an EA forum how the pirated copy was looking to be the most attractive, they (an EA rep) replied how it wasn't. Now, I expect the EA rep to say this, but at the sametime, it's the customers who decide what's the btter product, and if a significant proportion decide the pirated copy is superior to the retail copy they have to pay for, then you're just going to promote piracy of said game. You can have DRM without imposing draconian measures on your customers. EA learnt this already.

Of course piracy will always exist, but situations like this just make things worse for both the publisher and genuine customers.