It means you have to activate the game 15 times if you want to play multiplayer.

While I understand the overprotective DRM is ridiculous, I don't ever see it as a game ruining experience. I loved the original, and I'll be damned if this is going to make me cancel my pre-order.

As far as I can tell, you should be able to create an offline profile and be able to play single player without ever needing to activate with Games for Windows.

Fair enough. Check back and let us know how it is, be interesting to hear whether it's as good as the original.

For who doesn't know. All GFWL games have limited activations, Fallout 3, Dawn of War 2, GTA IV, Batman, Street Fighter 4 etc.. Some new GFWL games are using GFWL 3.0 features and serials are tieing to your gamertag and they have not limited activations like Red Faction Guerilla, Dirt 2, Section 8 etc...
If you don't want to buy the game because of the 15 limited activations for GFWL, just tell me didn't you buy that titles above? I am really happy and respect 2K Games are saying GFWL has limited activations (because they are telling the truth), other publishers and devs don't know or don't want to say GFWL has limited activations.

I've activated Halo 2 like...10 times or something and haven't been told no yet. I bought it used too. Is there a known limit on that?

Yes, all GFWL games have limited activations. Did you activate your game on different computers and OS' or only one pc and one OS? Installing the game on same PC and same OS didn't count for activation. You can uninstall and install your game without a problem.

Yep, this is the only time I've seen the publisher actually fess up that there ARE limits...most of them try to say "Oh, we didn't know!", which is patently ridiculous.

I bought Fallout 3, but I don't mind.
My gripe with BS2 is the whole package.
- 3 types of SecuROM (date, executable and disk check)
- if I want to play multiplayer, Games for Windows is an extra level of DRM
With Bioshock and GTA IV to go by, all of these will go unchanged for at least 2 years.
That 2K have scaled back their DRM to remove SecuROM activation has always been irrelevant. Bioshock had this activation limit removed but I still have to paste in a serial and have servers activate my game. With Bioshock 2, I'd still need to connect to servers to activate my game. What is the difference, really, seriously?

Heu... no... at least not for single player. I own Falout 3, Batman SFIV, Lost Planet Colony, Resident Evil 5 and others and I never ever needed to activate them online, and I know for sure because my gaming Windows is not connected to the net.
I played all those games with my offline account (which I created... well offline...) and they worked perfectly.
So maybe they have limited activation if you want to play online, or if you care about those stupid achievements thing (purely personal opinion ;-) ), but if you only play offline they don't have any, only a basic CD-check
By the way Dawn of War II and Red Faction use Steam for their online activation DRM and GTV4 uses Secorom.

if that's the case and it's definitely an improvement over the first one...

You can play BioShock 2 with offline profile too and don't need internet connection. GFWL games need activation for online part. Also Red Faction, GTA and Dawn of War 2 needs GFWL activation to play online. You need to enter your cdkey to play online and it activates the game via GFWL. BioShock 2 is using Securom for DRM too as I said you don't need to activate from GFWL if you don't want to play online. GFWL is not a DRM, it is for achievements and online.

It will need to be online to connect to SecuROm servers though, to date check and download a file like the first one. If you have disk version of Bioshock you know what I mean.

My bad, I misunderstood you, I thought you were saying that all the games you mentioned required online activation even for single player, which is something a lot of people seems to think every time they see a game using GFWL...

And Red Faction: Guerrilla retail needs Impulse activation, not using Steam DRM. :)

You are right again... I think that means it's time for me to go to bed ;)