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This sounds an awful lot like what our friends at Sony did recently with their root kit copy protection scheme.
Except this can cause HARDWARE damage, and nobody is doing anything against them… The only thing opposing them so far is the gamers trying to explain to developers what is wrong with it and why they shouldn’t use it…
But often the developers have no real say in that, it’s up to the publishers, which are run by suits who don’t understand things of this nature that much and only care for the nice big words Starforce uses to show them how many millions of sales they lose from piracy and how their system is the most perfectest there is…
Not to mention they show they don’t care AT ALL about IP ownership rights since they openly posted links to illegal torrets of a game that its developers claimed they got great sales without needing something like Starforce to aid them and also asked in public for illegal scans of magazines… Pretty ironic coming from people that are crusading against piracy in much the same way Jack Thompson was crusading against violent video games…
ahh, starforce
over the top game protection, known to cause loads of problems when you have stuff like alcohol 120% installed, and also rumoured to have broken dvd drives.
Its stupid though - i don’t like the idea that it tries to make you uninstall things like alcohol 120% - which is a very useful program without being involved in game piracy.
X3: Reunion is said to have this game protection - i’m staying away from it anyways tho untill the next patch comes out
If piracy didn’t happen, the companies wouldn’t have to be such assholes with protection.
They also wouldn’t be such assholes if shoddy software developers and naive publishers didn’t exist.
Piracy is no excuse for software like Starforce which makes perfectly legal applications stop working (not just alcohol 120%, but also many debugging and programming tools, burning applications etc, just because the company labels their users as “pirates” regardless) and is a real threat to the legal consumers’ computers and above all rights.
Read the link in that post about Galactic Civlizations 2 and you’ll see how developers can fight piracy in much better means without even having to use any copy protection whatsoever… Hell I’m even considering going out to buy that game even though I don’t like the genre, just because of the company’s attitude.
Just because Starforce’s developers label every download as a “lost sale” and developers fall for it doesn’t mean that it’s how things really are… It’s very unlikely that even 10% of the pirates would actually buy even 10% of the software they download if they were unable to pirate it.
Starforce rely on the companies’ ignorance and their own country’s shoddy law mechanics, not on presenting facts about piracy and attempting to fight it (which I might add they fail in doing).
Saying things like that wouldn’t happen without Piracy is like saying Jack Thompson wouldn’t happen without Grand Theft Auto. A possibly true but still very silly remark.
How can you say that? The whole reason that companies get so tight-assed about copyrights is because people keep stealing their stuff by downloading or buying a pirated version. The methods they use to prevent this have nothing to do with my argument.
Allegory: if the government has a task force to beat vehicle-related crime then vehicle-based crime must exist, otherwise no-one would even have THOUGHT of establishing a task force. Thus, because people ignore the rules of I.P.s, the holders of those I.P.s take measures, regardless of how (un)effective they are, in order to stop people stealing their stuff.
I’m speaking as someone who has several CDs that won’t play on my CD player or DC since they are “copy-protected”. I have to boot up the PC every time I want to listen to one. It’s a pain but the companies are doing it for a reason, and the casual acceptance of piracy in my country goes quite some ways to explaining that.
Your allegory with the task force to beat vehicle-related crime doesn’t apply here unless you add that, as a side effect of shitty task force training or whatever made up fantasy reason, said task force ends up damaging many many lawful civilian vehicles that have no relation to crime whatsoever. Would that be acceptable to you?
That’s exactly what Starforce is doing, it’s hurting proper customers’ own legal RIGHTS as well as computers, supposdelly to protect someone else’s rights. Piracy doesn’t justify such things in any way in my book. Does a publisher or developer have more rights than I do over MY OWN computer?
By the way, every download isn’t a lost sale as I mentioned before and anyone naive enough to believe that, is just as responsible as the people who attempt to convince them about their software’s effectiveness and the danger their games are in by using overexagerated numbers.
Click to read about a great effective way to reduce piracy without hurting customers
I’m not arguing the need for antipiracy software, the topic here is the dangerous scam that is Starforce specifically and nothing else. if they fixed the problems with it I’d have no problem having it on my system but after a personal bad experience (the post linked in the topic was written by me, just in case anyone didn’t get it), and seeing the company’s attitude, I’ll certainly not buy any titles that include it.
And no, I’m not going to pirate them either. I wanted to buy Dark Messiah of Might & Magic badly, I was even thinking that I could buy it but install a Starforce-free pirated copy instead of the original game to be safe. Alas, after doing research, every known pirated Starforce game simply bypasses the various checks of the software, while Starforce remains as harmful as ever in your system. Thus I’ll be avoiding DMoM&M and any other title with Starforce altogether. Thus, Starforce hurts the sales of the game instead of helping them by a) still allowing it to be pirated (no software is left uncracked) and b) driving away legal customers (no, I’m not the only one).