[MrBig101]

One of the admins over at the starforce forums (Starforce, the dreaded copy protection program thing) responded to a post by someone about Galactic Civilizations 2 (In response to "Game published without copy protection isn't commercial disaster"), and the admin posted a torrent of the game (It's now edited out...).

http://www.star-force.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=670

Pic:
http://www.neowin.net/staff/lardiop/starfo1.jpg


And man, look at the internet eruption!

http://forums.galciv2.com/index.aspx?ForumID=161&AID=106741&p=1

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/11/2049230

http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=32501

Thoughts?

[Flipside]

That's ****ing dispicable! I hope they get sued quite frankly. I paid for GalCiv 2, despite the fact I'm unemployed atm, and only to find out that some copy protection site is posting Torrent Links for it, simply because it doesn't have protection.

Well, X3 will certainly be the last Starforce protected game I ever buy.

[Nuke]

hopefully this will be a nail in the coffin for companies who do malitious things to paying users in order to stop piracy. i always found requiring the cd to play was rather annoying. that was in the old days. now some games wouldnt even run if you had certain cd burning tools installed (doom 3 wouldnt run because i had clone cd installed). not even to mention the crap microsoft tries to pull.

im glad to see there are companies with balls to leave out copy protection. because the only people that have to put up with the copy protection are people that buy the game. the people who download pirated games usually dont even see the anti-piracy features cause theyve been hacked away. even games with substantial anti-piracy features get pirated all the time. its like going to a movie theater and having to watch the anti piracy ad. abusing the paying customers in responce to piracy is wrong. perhaps even worse than piracy itself. cudos to the makers of galciv2, for making the point that quality software is a better way to stop piracy than loading it with crap like starforce.

of course another way to reduce piracy is to reduce the price of a software license. i spent a week trying to find a copy of the mechwarrior 4 compilation on torrent sites. instead i saw it in a bargin bin ad a department store for about $12 and i bought it. the morale to this story is that people will buy software if it isnt outrageously overpriced. in this case it was old software that had been marked down. i bet if companies shaved $10 of the price of software, it would reduce piracy. and they would porbibly sell enough extra copies to make up the difference. you can use software updates to extend the life of your software and it will reduce piracy (as well as extend your sales, as the product stays on the shelf longer). if you make quality software that is actually woth what you pay for it, it will reduce piracy. if you start using a 3rd party anti-piracy means, software price will go up, so your punishing people who are buying, and that increases piracy.

[Prophet]

I think this thing works for the sales of GalCiv2. The game, in its bare downloadable version 1.0 form, is incredibly buggy. No huge game killers, only a couple of CTD bugs and a hoard of smaller things that annoy you more and more when you play it. The thing is that you can't update it without the serial. So you are left with a great game that you know would be better if you'd just pay for it. A clever plot by Stardock if you ask me... I suppose that you could update pirated version should you have someones serial, never tried that so I can't tell.

Another related issue regarding this is the people without internet connections. Apparently the patch has to be veriefied after installing. So those who downloaded the patch at work and tried to get it working on their offline gaming computer are getting it right in the face. I've seen some grumbling about having to send a bunch of emails bakc and forth to get the game working.
That's one reason I am against pulling PC games off the shelves and relying on the internet

[aldo_14]

What an arsehole - that's absolutely disgraceful, to respond to comments about a game without protection selling well by posting a torrent allowing people to pirate it.  I don't care if he says, or even honestly did intend to, that it was simply for an example, as an employee of a supposedly security company he should know absolutely what the consequences would be.  If it was a large company, I'd imagine they'd take the opportunity to sue Starforce into the ground.

It's even worse because in my short experience, Stardock are a brilliant company in that respect, especially in allowing effectively unlimited re-downloads of the game even if it's the retail version you have.

[Shade]

They certainly don't seem to have any sales problems due to leaving out copy protection. I've been trying to get it for a few weeks now and it's sold out everywhere around here. And still, I'm not even tempted to... acquire... it because, frankly, I like the attitude of these developers and they deserve my money.

[MrBig101]

They certainly don't seem to have any sales problems due to leaving out copy protection. I've been trying to get it for a few weeks now and it's sold out everywhere around here. And still, I'm not even tempted to... acquire... it because, frankly, I like the attitude of these developers and they deserve my money.

If anything, leaving out copy protection has boosted the sales greatly.  Everywhere, Im seeing people that bought it just because it didn't have copy protection (Aside from the fact that it looks like a great 4x game).  And good for you for not trying to... acquire... it.  Stardock does deserve your money.  They rock!

[Sandwich]

I bought Galactic Civilizations 2 for 3 reasons:

1. People here said it was cool.
2. Gamespot and Gamespy gave it rave reviews, and similar scores to Freespace 2, I might point out. They called it the real successor to MOO, which I loved.
3. The lack of copy-protection.

Now, understand, the last game I bought was HL2. And I've played a number of full games since then. I leave the conclusion up to your imagination. But the point is, being "nice" in this case has apparently paid off for Stardock tremendously. Heck, I'm even considering trying out their suite of utilities (again) and buying it if I like it.

[Shade]

Geeze, now I know why I can't find it anywhere. It's not just sold out here, Stardock simply doesn't have any more copies to ship until they get another production run done. Selling well, indeed. Think I'll just settle for the buying and downloading it off their website as who knows how long it might take for stores to get more copies.

[karajorma]

Do Starforce really want people to start linking to sites which have their protected games available for download? Cause I'm sure we could all find links

[Turnsky]

y'know, this is a class act of irony, really.
i mean, the most heavily copy-protected game is the most pirated at some stage, and this, without copy protection, whilst also heavily pirated, is also selling like hotcakes. 

[IceFire]

Do Starforce really want people to start linking to sites which have their protected games available for download? Cause I'm sure we could all find links

It's against our forum policy to post such links.  However, its apparently not against theirs...

[Sandwich]

What'd be VERY cool is if a tracker site, such as TPB, actually subsidized purchases of the game for people. Even something as small as a $5 subsidy would go SO far, especially in today's media, that the reaction to it by other game companies and stuff would be, well, hilarious.

[Annorax]

What'd be VERY cool is if a tracker site, such as TPB, actually subsidized purchases of the game for people. Even something as small as a $5 subsidy would go SO far, especially in today's media, that the reaction to it by other game companies and stuff would be, well, hilarious.

Can't see that happening... the trackers simply don't have the money for that. They COULD give free advertising to game sellers and set their users up with legal purchase avenues before letting them get a torrent file...

[karajorma]

It's against our forum policy to post such links.  However, its apparently not against theirs...

I wasn't suggesting that we post them here just wondering whether Starforce would be happy to accept links to sites offering their own games for download as a counter-argument. Some how I doubt that they'd find that acceptable at all.

[SadisticSid]

Well here's to hoping Stardock will sue them, or better yet, enough negative publicity is generated by this disgraceful conduct to persuade publishers to abandon them in favour of something else.

[ZylonBane]

They're not going to sue them. What would be the point? It would just be throwing money down a lawyer-shaped hole. And these guys are based in Russia... it's probably not even illegal over there.

[NGTM-1R]

It's still illegal, technically. It's just they can afford to pay folks in Russia to look the other way, and Russia can be counted on to tell the US "Screw you!" if it becomes an issue. (Technically China would satisify those requirements too, but there's a further requirement of not sticking your nose into everything.)

[Cabbie]

That display of arrogance will only do nothing but hurt themselves in the long run as more and more people get wind of not only their horrible protection software but also their attitude I used to be pretty neutral about Starforce but this incident made me swear to myself that I'll never purchse a game with that piece of crap in it.

[karajorma]

Anyone got a list of Starforce protected games so that we know what to pirate boycott?