Digital Age Rants - Starforce

OK, recent events have resulted an uproar in the gaming community surrounding Starforce, a form of copy protection that prevents users from pirating a game that has the software bundled with it. What it does is sit quietly in your computer waiting for you to try to run the game from the Hard Drive, which it won't let you do, or run the game from a backup disc. Again, Starforce prevents you from doing this.

Recently, Stardock released Galactic Civilizations II, a game which has rapidly become a bestseller, even topping the charts in sales, and uses NO form of copy protection whatsoever. A totally awesome user of the Starforce Forums using the handle "infected" (Dude, MAD props to you if you're reading this) made a topic with a link to sales reports, and the lone, yet powerful phrase "Game published without copy protection isn't commercial disaster", obviously to get a response from the Starforce guys.

Oh, he got his response. And said response linked to a torrent site. Offering illegal downloads of Galactic Civilizations II. Here's how you should address all emails to this him:

Dear Starforce Guy: WTF were you thinking?

Before I begin, I need to make it perfectly clear that I don't pirate games. Nor do I support the practice. But with some of the tactics that Starforce pulls, I wouldn't exactly scoff if you were to say, oh come across a download that would end up getting them less money as opposed to going to a games store for a TOTALLY unrelated reason. I've got... Two games on my laptop right now. It's a Celeron with a 40 Gig hard drive. It's more of my media hub than a gaming machine. So some of the games I want, I can't exactly buy. I've been working on a gaming machine for months now, and now I'm at a standstill because I want to see the minimum I'll need to run UT2007. But back to the point: I've got two games. Unreal Tournament 2004, and Warcraft III. UT2004, I got the DVD edition, and it installed STRAIGHT to my hard drive. I put the disc back in it's case after installation, and it sits next to my PS2 games.

Warcraft III, on the other hand, came on two CDs. Understandable, since I bought the Battle Chest and it came with the Frozen Throne expansion. The biggest problem I have with this game is that I need the CD in the tray for it to run. That probably sounds like bitching, but the ABSOLUTE last thing I want when I'm playing a game on my laptop is the Optical Drive to be spinning as well. It's MURDER on a laptop battery to be putting pressure on nearly EVERY component, From the hard drive to the graphics chip to the CPU AND the disc drive. My battery doesn't last long, so I got a virtual drive running on my laptop.

Basically what that does is it sets a part of the hard drive apart to trick the computer into thinking it has another disc drive, and that part of the hard drive has the disc copied to it. So when a game tries to read that disc drive, it gets pointed to the virtual drive, and it thinks that's the disc. Why wouldn't it? It's got all the disc data, and it's in its own little drive.

That's extreme laymans terms, by the way. Don't email me with your complaints on how I got the partitioning wrong and didn't even MENTION all the protocols involved. Not everyone who reads this site is an ubergeek, get over yourself.

The problem with StarForce is that it goes Soup Nazi on me, with it's "NO BATTERY-SAVING, TIME-EFFECTIVE SOLUTION FOR YOU" What the hell is so DAMN bad about putting a game on my hard drive? The fact alone that starforce installs and is known to cause MASSIVE slowdowns on the computer it's installed on, and in some cases, if your hardware sends up any "red flags", the game won't install at it.

I'm not even kidding. If it doesn't like what you're running, it won't let you install the game.

If your HARDWARE. is SUSPICIOUS. The game won't install.

I swear to you, I read an article about a guy who apparently had his dvd drive stop working after StarForce was installed on his computer without him knowing. This dude got screwed out of what we're going to assume was a $150 combo drive. $1,500. Can you believe that? Stardock lost this guy his $15,000 combo drive. Now how's he gonna pay off his $150,000 loan for said drive? I hope whoever is in charge over there loses their $1,500,000 combo drive in a horrific computer implosion.

Here's the messege: Avoid copy protection at ALL costs. Even if you're not a pirate of games, movies, music, whatever. The whole Digital Rights Management issue is getting worse a lot faster than I'd hoped, and the best thing to do at this rate is let the ultra leet distrube their torrents online, and download the game from there, with the copy protection features stripped. But actually PURCHASE the game first.

And publishers, if your game is on this list, you had it coming the minute you decided to screw the customer over in your paranoia that maybe all of .5% of sales would be lost to pirates, whose actions probably could've been avoided if you'd price the game cheaper by not paying for copy protection licenses in the first place.

A P.S. to buyers - do your research. If you HAVE to have The Two Thrones, get it for console. If you've been itching for Bet on Soldier on PC, buy the game, grab the torrent. And if you ABSOLUTELY cannot live without Pac Man World 3, then for the love of God, play other games. Please, I'm begging you.