"If zhou won't buy zee copy protection, zee will suffer..."

[Fig]

Starforce. One of the biggest copy protection companies (and one of the most intrusives) out there, to whom more and more companies (including Ubisoft) are rallying in fear of the evil pirates.

But the makers of Galactic Civilization II didn't give in to the pirates fear. They have virtually no copy protection on their latest game. You don't even need the CD in the drive to play.

And yet, rather than being pirated, they're the hottest selling game at WalMart on their release week, with sales exceding within 10 days the total sales of Galactic Civilization I.

So what does the people at Starforce do?

They make a thread to their own forum about how people will pirate the game. And to prove it, *they post a link to a torrent site that had the game*! (the torrent sites, incidentally, quickly took it down at the request of the gamemakers. Starforce waited a lot longer to take down THEIR link...)

How long until game developers who reject StarForce wakes up with horses heads in their bed?

http://games.slashdot.org/games/06/03/11/2049230.shtml

 

[Swifty]

OMFG. I saw this on SlashDot too.

Starforce is made by a company run by geek mafia. Period.

"Not willing to pay protection, huh?"

The only Starforce game I've installed on my box so far has been Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. After I finished the game, I deleted my Windows folder and reinstalled Windows XP. I'm not keeping that shit around any longer than it has to be.

EDIT: Digg and BluesNews are also reporting this as well. I hope this thing gets into Penny Arcade's hands and blows up. Hopefully this'll be scandalous enough that Ubisoft and other purchasers of Starforce licenses will have to keep their distance away from these assholes.

 

[Hikari-chan]

I hate Starforce, it's just like Sony's DRM in a game disk....

I'll stay with SafeROM and Safedisc. heh.