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The Problems With Game Copy Protection
Next Generation has a piece looking at the sometimes overly enthusiastic copy protection schemes used in PC games. From the article: "In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares. These days, however, copy-protection software is ubiquitous, and any PC game bought at retail is going to have it embedded on the game disc(s) in one form or another. I'm okay with that in theory, but some of these anti-piracy software programs are so potent that they cause issues for legitimate game buyers. One of the leading brands, StarForce, is notorious for not only making it difficult for a small percentage of legitimate users to load up StarForce-protected games, but also for leaving potentially problem-causing StarForce software behind on your PC, even after you've deleted the game it was protecting."
Both of those protections use device drivers, to check for debuggers primarily.
Quite possibly. On the other hand, you really need to know how many false positives there are before having some reasonable debate about this. Hard statistics are difficult to come by, but an UbiSoft developer wrote a public report on it. Those statistics don't seem to show any serious levels of problems (blue screens or SF related hard locks were about 1 in 10,000 I think ...).
Now for sure, some people who have problems won't report them, they'll just unplug CD drives or dick about with the BIOS or whatever. But not all gamers are that dedicated. I'd say most gamers I know just want to play games, and aren't super technical actually. So I think if SF causes a lot of problems, most people will either report it to tech support or return the game.
You're behind the times. That's the old rumour, however there is a big reward for people who can reproduce the problem. After the reward was posted (and it's now at $10,000 I think) the rumours changed - now it's that SF causes gradual performance loss in some cases over a period of months.
Neither can I, and in fact though this rumour is also persistent I've never seen any reports of actual exploits or any technical data on where such the bug is. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a way to do it, because writing secure kernel code is hard, but that's why the rumour has such potency. I'll believe it once it's been conclusively proven (ie there's some kind of advisory or patch for it).
Didja try them? Do they work? StarForce definitely is crackable, and there are even generic cracks (as I was reminded on IRC the other day), but the generic cracks are a lot of effort and the games that get cracked usually have poor integration with the system. As pointed out elsewhere the developer has a lot of flexibility to protect as little or as much of the games as they like. StarForce 3 is also quite a few years old.
Now don't get me wrong. I hate stuff like StarForce, because it makes games protected using it practically impossible to play on Linux using Wine. And of course it does cause occasional false positives. But, I've also seen products I've worked on be pirated, even idiots who tried to get tech support for pirated copies, and I can understand why companies do it. The idea that games would make more money if they halved the price and removed copy protection is crazy, copy protection really isn't that expensive, for a big commercial game I think you only need a few thousand people or so to buy the game instead of pirate it and you make your money back.
SO you didn't even try installing, Your just basing your anit-SF opinion on the fact you read it on the intarweeb. Nice. I got some beach front land in the everglades if your interested. It's beautiful and warm! And the water is great!
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