Scandalous news about Starforce

[Joe Forster/STA]

Please, everyone keep forum rule #7 in mind, thank you!

[Spellfive]

Lets not forget the main argument here.
I like car examples, if, for the reason that cars do get stolen quite often companies invent protective mechanisms that hinder distribution, sales and popularity of cars, they`d be quite stupid.
Peer to peer is an excellent way of distributing software. The designers of starforce are of the opinion its best to ruin this innovation by forcing their opinion upon GalCiv II, simply cuz they dont pay.
I think starforce is prolly russian mafia.

[I_Will_Never_Die]

did someone post this on shoutwire.com yet?

[rlsuth]

More bad press: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6145864.html

[GilFuin]

Originally Posted by rlsuth

More bad press: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6145864.html

Interesting to read:

GS: Why did Stardock opt not to use traditional industry-accepted forms of copy protection?

BW: It's only industry-accepted in the PC game industry--the industry that people are regularly saying is "doomed." Most of our business is in the application software market (the market that no one argues is "doomed"), and such copy protection measures are not used. I don't have to keep my Adobe Photoshop CD in the drive to use it.

We simply applied the PC application software model of IP protection to our games--release the game with no CD-based copy protection and include a unique serial number that they need to use in order to obtain updates...

GS: Will this change your approach to copy protection in the future?

BW: Not at all. As I type this, EBGames has released their top-selling PC games from last week. Galactic Civilizations II was number one. So if piracy is such a menace, it's not apparently affecting us to the degree that some say it should.

That's the point. The best protection is a valid serial number, so you can't play online if you are not a legal user.Copy protections can be justified for games which only have single player mode, but not for multiplayer games calling for a serial anyway. Only the existence of these numbers can force people to spend money in a (good) game despite they could got it illegally.

Again, Starforce can't argue nothing, failling to remember "a few" SF games which can be played from a copy.