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Controversial StarForce Copy Protection Creators Quizzed
Thanks to FiringSquad for its interview with the creators of the StarForce copy protection scheme for PC videogames. The author explains: "In recent months there's been an increasing awareness and alarm over StarForce copy protection. It's actually a driver that installs itself with the [Windows] games that come shipped with it, and originally it didn't uninstall when the game was uninstalled." StarForce's Abbie Sommer argues the advantages of "driver-level copy protection", explaining: "The drivers are what prevents the use of kernel debugger utilities such as SoftICE, Cool Debugger, Soft Snoop etc. Also the drivers prevent emulators from spoofing a drive, and thwart burning tools such as Alcohol 120%." The author concludes by injecting a little personal opinion into the mix, arguing: "PC games will never go away, but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease."
Thanks for nothing! If I want to use these tools then I shouldn't have to put up with this kind of crap from software companies. It's almost like them installing a virus. They wouldn't like it if I installed software on their machines that denied access to certain things, would they.
It's a Bagel.
I hope the big publishers all get run off of the computer game industry, and all the people who like "gaming" instead of computer games go with them.
Then those of us who prefer good games to good graphics will have computer games to ourselves again.
Bring back the games on floppies in little plastic bags!
and you can be sure that I'll start to behave like one.
The guy is missing something. They're trying so hard to beat softice.. but they forget that pros don't need to use breakpoints, thus they don't need to actually run the app to disassemble it.
http://hte.sf.net would work just peachy.
"if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease."
Yeah, I've been hearing that since my Amiga gaming days, back when I had to travel to the capital city just to find a place that sold legitimate game copies, back when piracy was as just a blank floppy away. Look how much the number and quality has shrunk in the gaming market since then...
.... cause we all know how much damage piracy does to the music industry. Ba-zing!
That's right. All your base.
The stronger you make the copy protection, the more you inconvenience your legitimate users, and the more attractive the "cracked" product becomes. Making the w4rz3d version a more useful product than your original is a bad marketing ploy.
In my opinion, such things should be categorized as malware, and should only be allowed if adequate warning is given to the user before installation.
Anyway, even when installed as a driver, it can't be fully crack-proof --- the driver can be removed, and the game code can be changed to skip the accesses to the driver. If the game is popular enough, a crack will soon be produced (probably unusable for Internet games though), and even legit users may use them so that they can get rid of the driver that is possibly destabilizing the system.
For gamers with CD-ROMs that are incompatible with SecuROM (and other copy protection measures), it is currently more convenient to download and crack pirated versions, than to buy a legitimate copy.
This is a dangerous discrepancy, and is running the game industry into the ground.
First off, you most can certainly debug driver modules. SoftICE runs Ring 0. Even if their driver runs Ring 0, you can still see it. It's also on your hard disk. Even if it somehow disables the machine if SoftICE is detected, you have the data. It will be disassembled and it will be cracked.
/rant
And this brings up a point about copy protection. It really only fucks with the people who actually buy the CD. I bought The Sims after, admittedly, not paying for it for a while. But I did go out and buy it after about a month, and lo and behold my CD Key was already registered. Ah well, an email took care of that. But, next I buy Neverwinter Nights. Damn CD Protection goes so far as to not work in my DVD drive. This happens with a TON of protected games. Flight Simulator 2002 would continuously corrupt on install, SimCity 4, Baldurs Gates both 1 AND 2... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the SecuROM/SafeDisc methods do *not* produce valid Redbook CDROM standard CD's. Doesn't happen on non-secured discs like Streets and Trips, Windows XP, etc... Either way, I paid for these games and they don't work. Yet I can steal them and they work, no hassle. Hmm, not too hard of a debate. I actually sometimes will buy the game then download the crack because I'm tired of dealing with shitty copy protection.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Nobody wants DRM or Malware type software destroying their freedom to use PC's.
No software company wants to invest 30 million into a (small?) project where sales are predicted by a declining history and diminishing market, or perhaps could disappear given the alarming ability to download gigs of data in a day.
In a perfect world, they would produce X, you want X, you buy X.
In a semi-perfect world. People Copy X, like it, Buy X
In todays world, a bit more perfect: People who copy and don't buy X, wouldn't have bought it anyway. (so does this mean copying impacts software?)
What does happen. People want games, if copying didnt exist, they would buy them, prices would drop. However, peope who say they wouldn't have bought the game anyway, shouldn't have needed to copy it.
OK, that bit over: If you purchase games, do you put up with measures that, in the end, are there for your benefit, as a games consumer (i.e., if they did stop copying)
Perhaps the issue is not so clear cut as music (which has always been way overpriced and overcontrolled)
Computer games used to be 1.99 casettes, 4.99 etc... not they are 49.99 at tops. Considering lower costs of marketting, vast market size, limitless and cheap distribution (electronically) and cheaper CD/DVD case distribution, the companies hsould be able to create games which sell for less, and meets a price that brings more consumers.
Sometimes it is easier to copy a game than physically walk out and buy it. This is the mentality they are dealing with.
At the end of the day - don't steal from people, no matter how rich they are.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
"copy protection is a necessary part of the publishing process"
Yah, and remember the dark ages, when only the church could copy? Well if corporations get their way, it'll be dark again soon. Thanks Abbie!
"We have to live with it, and I don't think it is going away."
No Abbie, I don't have to live with it because I never buy copy protected software. Period. Sorry, but it's a religious thing with me.
"but let's face it, publishers aren't stupid"
Yes, yes they are, and evil and greedy too. First off, they corrupt copyright so that it no longer does what the founding fathers intended. Then they use it to abuse the market in order to force consumers to pay excessive prices for poor quality games.
In my humble opinion, piracy is a direct and inevitable outcome strictly due to the lack of fairness in the intellectual property issue.
Corporations have perverted the process and most people are simply taking the most economical route to get what they want
From where I sit, all of this is because companies will not produce products as inexpensively as possible. Indeed, these companies would earn more if they simply lowered the price to a point were far more people could easily afford to buy their products. As it is, most software is simply not affordable unless you are fairly affluent. So yes, they, the software publishers, are stupid, and what's worse, they're incompetent and abusive.
Words to men, as air to birds.
if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy ... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease. Without a big market there can be no big budgets. No Doom 4, no Far Cry 2 and no Half-Life 3.
Ironically, auther was not able to come up with even one example wich is not sequel. Indsutry really have problem with creativity, piracy notwithstanding.
I used to have Sim City on the Amiga, it was a great game which had its own form of copy protection. It was a dark red/brown peice of paper with a series of numbers (in black) in a chart. It was designed this way so you couldn't photocopy it and there were too many numbers on the chart to practically write them all down. (Thank god i'm not colour blind)
My friend also had Sim City for the Amiga, but he got a copied/cracked version without the 'code check' process. Now I ended up getting a copy of his game since it didn't mean I had to deal with the annoying hard to read chart just to get into the game I had bought.
Summary: Pirate user no problems, Paying customer annoyed.
I reguraly crack the games I buy simply to save the CDs getting scratched, or even having to bother finding them, when I first heard of this type of copy protection I knew it was a vary bad thing.
It was a Raven Sheild patch that introduced a CD emulation check and stopped the game loading if it found anything.
Now imo that's very bad, software being designed pourposely to not work if other software is present. Imagine if MS added in a 'function' to stop Office working if you installed Mozilla for example, a lot of people would be pissed.
Acidentaly incompatability is one thing, but when it's by design, it is wrong on so man levels.
In the end people will be forced to pirate if they want to play a game regardless of their intentions to buy it or not.
Seems like a good first pass at reverse-engineering this driver would be to do the windows equivalent of strace/truss/tusc on it and see how the game communicates with the driver and what the driver says back.
I'm sure it wouldn't be as simple as that, they probably aren't "well-behaved" (which should me no WHQL for them). But if it were that simple, writing your own dummy driver that spoofs the game into thinking everything is hunky-dory would be trivial.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I would be quite happy to swap CDs/DVDs on a PC if the game could be played entirely from that disc. I am not happy about copying a couple of gigabytes of data to my hard disc, then inserting the CD every time I want to play.
If you're a games developer, choose one: Either require the CD to be inserted, but don't put anything other than savegames and other personalised data on my hard disc, or install to the hard disc, but don't require the CD. Whichever you choose, I'll be happy.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
My attitude is very simple. If some moronic game company is going to install drivers on my PC without even asking, and then try to tell me that I can't use their game on my PC because I have unusual hardware or unusual software running, then they can go fsck themselves. I'm one of the people who do actually buy games, but I'm damned if I'm going to bend over for these morons.
Seriously, almost every game I own I've ended up downloading a CD crack for because either it's far too much of a pain to have to find a particular CD just to play a game that's already on my hard drive, or their appallingly bad 'copy protection' crap doesn't work with my SCSI DVD drive. These people are fscking over their customers who actually pay for the games, and wondering why we stop buying them.
No game should ever, ever, ever install a driver on a PC without asking and without making clear on the box that they will be doing so. Some of us use our PCs for real work as well as games, and the last thing I want is some stupid 'copy protection' driver screwing up my system.
Yeah because since the days of my Sinclair Spectrum when we copied software from audio tape to tape the computer games industry has really shrunk.
FFS, How the hell do these people get away with nodding, looking thoughtful and saying these things in an erudite fashion?
Back in the day, in the UK you sold ONE copy of a game per school, that's it (yeah we were all funding terrorism back then too). Since then no industries have shrunken as a result... not the aerospace industry, not the catering industry and sure as hell not the software industry.
We could get all melodramatic and start considering papers by Gerring on propoganda and the manipulation of the masses... lets just consider one thing.
The cornerstone of all propoganda is a kernel of fear. If X is allowed to continue Y will happen.
If software piracy continues then the quality of computer games will suffer.... I'm 35 and I've been told that exact same line since I was 13. The exact same line. In 22 years I've come to the conclusion it's not true. It's propoganda, it's tapping into an unfounded fear in the audience.
I was told the same about tape recorders and the music industry. I was told the same about video tape and the movie/cinema industry... all in over 2 decades, untrue. Propoganda.
If somebody tells you the sky is falling in, don't just take their word for it, look up yourself at the sky and ask yourself if it looks as if the sky is falling in.
"people who have money and don't have time to be jerked around with nonsense."
High five, low five, catch it on the rebound.
This is one of the first times that someone 'in the industry' has hit the nail on the head with regards to my personal experience of gaming; it's not that I'm short of the cash, I just really don't want to prop up a copy protection industry that has slimed into place based on the fact that piracy is happening, but the protestations have hit fever pitch because they can be tracked. It's like the figures that get promoted that X activity costs X dollars per year in lost revenues. Figures like that are fictional guesstimates that are intended to cause round-eyed disbelief in people that don't normally deal with _really big numbers_, especially connected with the idea that a downloaded game is a lost sale. It's horribly arrogant to assume that downloaded copy will survive a quick review or that the person downloading it would have bought the game if the download wasn't possible.
It's the PR spin that annoys me the most, both from the perspective of holding demos until after the release rush (early adopters get raped every which way, and it's mostly a peer issue), releasing buggy software to match a given release date, or buying advertising space and calling it 'reviews'.
It's gratifying to see someone _actually_ mention these things in relation to their own business, and while I have little use for the object desktop, the sheer display of Mr Wardell's ethics is enough for me to consider supporting his company.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
The interview mentioned that demos include this copy protection because the demo exes end up being very similiar to the final version's exes, meaning a potential cracker would have interest in the demo's executable files.
Unfortunately, the person interviewed said that agreeing the the EULA gives them permission to install their software without telling you. Legally they're right... but it's a bit of BS; I want to know what is installed on my machine, and I shouldn't have to wade through a thick license agreement to know precisely what's going on.
LegendMUD
Try that in 10 years, or when Blizzard has passed through 5 different companies (it could happen). Or, if you want the fun and excitement now, try to get a replacement copy of Pirates! or, if you lost the code wheel, Starflight. It won't happen, even if you paid for the copy legit.
Ok so one thing stuck out at me the second I read it.
""Games are crap so often I don't want to get ripped off" - try reading reviews and playing demos. Besides, good luck getting a car dealership to refund you your money after you so much as signed the contract, never mind drove the car. Not all that many goods can be used and returned for your money back."
Actually I do believe Saturn, at least here in Canada, offers a no questions asked 30 day period where you can return the car. I remember a commercial where a lady had lost her job and could no longer afford the car so she returned it to the dealership, but in the end wound up buying a Saturn again because of their great customer service.
Anyways, that's beside the point. Frankly, reviews and demos aren't always the best indicator of how "buy-worthy" a game is. There's several factors you cannot determine from a demo. You cannot tell the length of the game for example, or if it would have any replay value whatsoever. You also can't really tell, through a short demo, whether the game is overly repetitive for the entire length of the game or not. Reviews also are not a great indicator. There have been games entirely trashed by the industry for having less than stellar graphics and poor sound, but even though the gameplay was absolutely stellar, it still got a crappy review. It's very hard to find a review(er) that will exactly match your personal tastes.
I'm not condoning piracy, or stealing money from the developers, but frankly, the prices of games are too ridiculously high for a casual gamer, which is a vast majority of the market. Maybe publishers need to take a back seat to the developers and let the developers actually have a good chunk of the profit earned from game sales. After all, it is their work, and maybe if the publishers weren't so damn greedy, they'd earn a bit more money from it.
Legally they're right only if EULAs are enforceable, which is certainly debateable.
BTW, by reading this comment you have agreed to give me your first-born son.
It is completely unacceptable that a demo could install this dubious software
A game demo is supposed to allow a potential customer to learn how well the software will run on her computer. If the game includes obstructive copy-protection, the demo should too; otherwise it's false advertising!
By using the weird driver in the demo, at least buyers get a warning before PAYING for the thing.
Folks, it is only a matter of time before StarForce disappear off the face of the planet.
Right off from the first question they start spewing garbage from a technical persepctive.
Drivers cannot stop SoftICE from working, at best they can try to be aware of it and try to malfunction when they detect its presence.
Drivers can be uninstalled (the easiest method being to simply delete the file). Furthermore any activity of their driver can be spoofed by a replacement driver that just says everything is ok.
Their driver is a simple Windows IFS driver that filters filesystem calls (so called IRPs), probably based on hardware/process name. The reason they mess up people's USB drives is because they mis-detect them.
On the surface, it appears it would take only a couple hours for an experienced IFS driver writer to completely bypass their driver (probably along the lines of letting the driver run but ensuring it never gets to see any of the file system calls).
I'm willing to bet the only reason none of the games shipped with their product have been cracked has to do more with the lack of popularity of the games then with the copy protection.