Ubisoft to drop Starforce copy protection

[Cauton]

Ubisoft has decided to ditch Starforce as the copy protection scheme for their games. This is awesome news, as Starforce is a blight upon PC gaming. I hope that more publisher will follow Ubisoft's example and opt to use other copy protection software. It would actually work to their benefit, as I know a lot of people are refusing to buy games that use Starforce.

It would be great to see more companies adopt Stardock's approach to copy protection, shipping the game without any copy protection at all, and instead require the game to be registered with an unique serial key that allows you to download updates and/or access certain features in the game. I think the best way to increase your sales is not to impose a lot of restrictions on the end user, but instead to foster goodwill by trusting your target audience to buy the game legit. I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel a lot more inclined to support a company that sees me as a decent human being, and not a potential software thief.

[Phoenix's Rage]

Don't most companies today use Securom 7?

[Logick]

The best copy protection ever for a game, i read about it once in Game Developer's magazine.  What this game did was add a simple copy protection in the game to fool you into thinking this was the copy protection for the game.  In the game there was a check at startup and at a few specific points in the game, that would check if the CRC for the executable was altered(most common way is removing the simple copy protection), if the check failed, the game was rendered unbeatable, you could not progress any futhur.  The beauty of this was no one figured out this was the copy protection, they didn't figure it out until the game hit the bargain bins.   I salute the developers for doing that!

[Cauton]

Don't most companies today use Securom 7?

Starforce has (had?) been gaining popularity amongst publishers, as it is considered to be one of the hardest copy protection schemes to crack. While it's true that a majority of games still use SafeDisc or Securerom, Ubisoft's decision to drop Starfoce based on consumer feedback should make other publishers think twice about using Starforce themselves. Also, quite a few high-profile and/or higly rated games have been using Starforce, as evident by this list. Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, King Kong, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory are just a few examples.

Logick:
It was Codemasters that used that copy protection scheme, and included it in Operation Flashpoint IIRC. I seem to recall that it wasn't a big success, and was dropped some time later. I think it was because the games that would use FADE got a reputation for being buggy as hell, when in reality it was just the copy protection software kicking in, and also because the protection was kind of buggy and would sometimes affect paying customers as well.