Slashdot Mirror
Galactic Civilizations II Breaks DRM Mold
Machitis writes "A recent news item at GalCiv2.com says, 'Our license allows you to install the game onto as many machines that you own that you want as long as only one copy is being used at once. How many sales are lost because people want to have a game on their laptop and desktop and don't want to drag CDs around so choose not to buy the game? [...] we were quite disturbed to discover that the company that makes Starforce provided a working URL to a list of pirated GalCiv II torrents. I'm not sure whether what they did was illegal or not, but it's troubling nevertheless and was totally unnecessary.'"
Boy, if you wanted any proof that the Starforce people are _serious_ assholes, there it is.
Now everyone knows what gamers have been saying all along.
Starforce encourages piracy.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Makes me wonder if it was Starforce guys that released this torrents just to sell their product. Looking at how did they behave recently (threatening people, etc) I would bet some money on this.
Don't make the same mistake I did and run out to purchase the game based on good reviews and the fact that the developers have a good attitude. At this point I'm pretty much thinking of GC2 in the same way I thought about Black & White: It was awesome for the first few days but over the course of a week or so I started liking it less and less. Even after a few patches I'd say the game is still suffering from a poor UI and a lack of information about how the game mechanics actually work. Wait for a demo, and then decide if you're going to buy, as always.
A sensible approach to a modern world.
The trust model can work.
Gaining the trust of your user base WILL be beneficial.
If you treat them fairly, they will pay you back.
As long as the torrent sites follow the DMCA rules (as it suggests the one in the article does) then the piracy can be tamed (and having lots of well intentioned customers warning them of torrents will help)
Word of mouth will get this game far, I wonder just how many torrent downloaders will purchase this game vs an EA game?
Does high downloads turn into high profits?
I see something similar happening with Serenity, I saw it months ago after downloading it, but today went out and bought a copy.
I want to tell Wheldon and the backers I support it and want more.
liqbase
And it is the most effective way to prove his point that I'm aware of, so I'd like to give the Starforce guy the benefit of the doubt (as odious as I find copy protection and DRM and similar things), even though he probably should have considered how his comment would be taken -- piracy of a program that's sold by somebody who is not their customer is NOT ANY OF HIS BUSINESS, even if it does suggest that his software is great or something (it's not, but I digress.) (And really, even if this were a customer of his, posting a link like this is bad form. A screen shot of how many people are involved in the torrent would have proven the point almost as well, and get him a lot less flak.
However, the point that he's trying to make is easily rebuffed by simply posting another link (or many other links) to software that was protected by Starforce and yet people are still downloading it, because the protection has been cracked, either via things like SecuROM or a cracked binary that removes the Starforce checks. Copy protection negatively affects those who paid for the software the most -- the pirates just emulate it, or use cracks to bypass it, so it doesn't really affect them at all.
But if I ever needed a tangible reason to not use Starforce products, this would be enough.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The forum admin linked to a torrent search of GalCiv II...that is utterly shameful.
id Software have been making the most popular games in the industry for over a decade, and have never bothered with heavy copy restrictions. They tend to put in copy restrictions as long as they have zero chance of inconveniencing their customers.
If only more game companies would just follow the leaders and dump this Starforce DRM crap...
I'm sure I don't need to finish.
It's a great game by a great company and I pre-ordered it and have been enjoying it for a while now.
The point is though that they're not treating their customers like criminals by default. This is something that we really should all support. Mutual trust between company and buyer is something that's been almost eradicated over the past few years by rape-artists like Starforce and Sony.
The proof of what Starforce is all about is right there in front of you. "They didn't pay us loads of money to crap all over their customers, so DAMMIT WE'RE GOING TO PROMOTE PIRACY OF THEIR SOFTWARE." You know, does this remind anyone else of mafia-like tactics? That's because that's exactly what this is. It look for all intents and purposes like a protection racket.
Starforce are saying by their actions - "Give us money or we'll encourage and make it easier for people to take from you."
Support Stardock, Screw Starforce.
I wish someone would have posted a bunch of links to that forum for torrents of games that _are_ protected by Starforce. They aren't hard to find. This was little more than a scare tactic.
I read the internet for the articles.
..to coin a phrase. Although the actual game has no DRM in it, the guys at Stardock use the unique serial number method to access online content such as frequent updates and bugfixes, giving people a good incentive to buy it instead of pirating it.
On top of there being no DRM, the game is also $10 cheaper than most retail games, which makes up for there being no multiplayer in it (at the moment.) The guys over at IGN reckon there's multiplayer architecture hidden in the game at the moment, and think they'll incorporate the multiplayer later on as part of their 'geniune advantage' scheme. Who knows, it may boost their game sales up a notch after the initial release sales have died down. Good on 'em!
Peace, Love, Unity, Respect
I think, a strong deterrant to piracy, based off my own experiences and those of people I know is: Allow me to buy just the CD key (and patch it so it doesnt need the CD to play).
People will download the games, piracy isnt going to go away. But alot of games have awesome online play, that you can access with a stolen copy (usually).
So allow these people, who downloaded the game, to just buy a real KEY from you. Sell the retail box, a download copy, or just the CD key, users choice.
personally, It is very difficult for me to GO OUT and buy a game. My work schedule and living situation, plus where I am simply doesnt permit it more than once every three months. If I could download a torrent copy of a game, then purchase the CD key. Boy, we'd be in business.
About fracking time a game company figured out that people don't like the CD dongle. One of the reasons CounterStrike was such a huge hit was once you installed it, it just ran. No CD needed in the drive. Anytime I clicked it, I was good to go. I've got a mess of banged up media - three copies of some games - just because they need the physical disk in the drive.
The net dongle (via Steam and their ilk) is OK for multiplayer games, but it still pisses me off when I want to do single player. I got HL2, but don't plan to buy any more stand alone games that have to call home every time they start up.
Lastly, the StarForce stuff can badly munge up a system. I can't see any titles worth building a SCSI only box for just so my other software continues to run after they try to rewrite system drivers. I hope the support calls bury any profit those who opt for this type of 'protection'.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Whats not true?
thats the link from the header that I have already read and replied to.
If you've got the wrong end of the stick regarding something I've said, at least clarify what you have a problem with.
liqbase
They seem to be ironically promoting piracy of a companies product just because they wouldnt use starforce.
thats clearly illegal so...
http://www.theesa.com/piracy/index.php
I've already reported them, the mroe who do so, the better.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
http://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=king%20kong&
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: (action/adventure, Ubisoft)s &audio=&video=&apps=&games=on&porn=&other=&what=se arch&page=0&orderby=se
http://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=two%20throne
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (stealth action, Ubisoft)r y&audio=&video=&apps=&games=on&porn=&other=&what=s earch&page=0&orderby=se
http://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=chaos%20theo
Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood (first person shooter, Gearbox)a rms+earned+in+blood>
http://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=brothers+in+
X3 (space sim, Enlight Software)a mes=on
http://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=x3+reunion&g
enjoy.
I'm not sure why you think that reminding us what the story links to is helpful....
However, you still need a key to play online on legit servers (not cracked ones).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It pisses me off that game demos have these protections too. I wonder if game companies are lazy to remove them from demos, want us customers to test them, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes, I consider StarForce evil. Anything that installs in order to protect a software I paid for against me, the owner of the machine it's installed on, has its priorities seriously messed up.
Check: X3, a game I considered buying until I found out it's got SF in it. No sale.
Check2: GalCiv2, a game I might buy when it becomes more affordable (sorry, 50 for a game isn't fair. Let's talk again when it's 35). No stupid copy protection is a good argument - my main machine is a notebook...
Also, there's literally tons of tools out there to circumvent SF. Most of them appear to be a PITA to use, but they're there. The largest group of gamers who copy regularily are kids with not enough money and more than enough time, so they won't mind.
Plus, of course, the cracker groups who'll break any new SF game in a day or two.
Nah, to me SF and its likes are a big scam designed to rip off software companies who should better spend the money on making their games less buggy.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
One thing, though: At least SF does provide a removal tool. That's the one reason I don't consider it a trojan.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Starforce games are not pirated at all... Strangelly enought, right now there are thousands of people downloading torrents of: X3: Reunion, UFO: Aftershock, Splinter Cell3....
Their half-ass copy protection is easly bypassed and if don't have IDE optical drives it's like there is no protection at all.
Gal Civ 2 has no cd protection, and i think after this they despise star force even more!
stardock are very good for customer service - two updates already and the games barely been out 2 weeks, itnerviews, updates on the website etc
The game itself is quite fun, but there a few draw backs that emerge whilst playing.
Please RTFA. There are two main points to it, A: Stardock, the company behind GalCiv, uses virtually no DRM and particularly doesn't use third-party customer-unfriendly DRM such as that provided by Starforce, and that the heavy sales of the game may seem threatening to companies whose primary buisness is selling DRM software (again, such as Starforce.)
B: A Starforce employee posted on the Starforce forums a link to a site where pirate torrents of GalCiv2 could be downloaded. Ostensibly this was to provide "proof" that GalCiv/Stardock were suffering from piracy. (Presumably with the intent to encourage other companies to purchase Starforce software.) As noted in other comments however some people are viewing it as a mafia-esque tactic to harm Stardock by increasing piracy of their game. (Presumably with the intent to intimidate Stardock and other companies into purchasing Starforce software.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That game blew me away. For about three days. Then I deleted it and never had the slightest urge to ever play again.
Stardock isn't primarily in the games business. In fact, the only "major" game they produce is the GalCiv series. (They did make some other games their interns made as very low-budget titles, like Lightweight Ninja) GC1 was published by Strategy First, and had DRM on the original title (they removed it in a future patch). Strategy First stiffed Stardock, so they published GC2 themselves at a budget of $300,000. I think they've made their profit on it already due to initial sales, which have been stronger then anything Starforce has gotten so far. The thing most people don't get about piracy is that the economic cost of piracy isn't the cost of the game for each copy downloaded. Most people who download a game wouldn't even consider buying it without the download (a few will buy if they like) This is one reason, to go on a related topic- that anime companies have allowed fansubbers to continue in most cases- while it's illegal, they view it as a form of advertising- the only change in their business model is that they have a tendency to pick up series now before they're fansubbed. You can tell by looking at the Starforce forums their forum rep, whoever he is, has no concept of English grammar or tact. Basically, I think the lesson we're learning from all this is that at least for the radical fringe of games (I don't think the average gamer knows what Starforce is, or even if he's infected by it)- we view non-invasive DRM as part of customer service. Of course, if GC2 was crap, no one would have this discussion- it's a kudos really for Stardock that the oligarchs (using a term that's perjorative to Russians) at Starforce felt a threat and struck at them.
We asked them nicely to consider not listing our work on their torrent listing site. They did. Score one for politeness.
GalCiv II is sort of a mix of Civilizations and MOO (2, not 3). The ship designer will make you enjoy building units. :-)
A lengthy forum post on the lack of multiplayer in the game can be found here. It provides the reasons that it was left out, and they make a lot of sense. But he also is careful to say that multi is not a part of the base game, and even says the architecture was designed to handle it. So...we'll see.
You just slashdotted The Pirate Bay. No pir8 booty for me. *sigh* guess I'll go look at Carmen Electra's for a while ;)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
UT guys are pretty good about copy protection in moderation. Shortly after release, the official patches remove the cd-checks. Happened to UT2k3 and 2k4 as far as I can remember.
Nice touch
Any publisher using it is completely liable for ALL damages.. This is the same thing Sony sneaked into their CD's, and has the SAME vulnerabilities to Root Kits.
Any publisher that uses Starforce, is opening themselves up to hundreds of millions in liability.
The "license key" is installed from the CD. It is identical to that on every other copy of the CD sold. It is good for a certain date range, usually beginning when that version of the software was produced and ending at some arbitrary date in the future where whoever chose it is sure that nobody will ever be using it again. That was a lot of fun when people were running systems forward for Y2K testing, and they weren't stopping at 2001; they tested way out, some to 2010, some to 2036 (or 2038?, whenever the 32-bit unix date rolled over). The only reason the software failed was because the license was not valid for the date the system thought it was.
Anyone who knows the license mechanism, or the install mechanism (and it's common knowledge for the sysadmins who install it) knows where to find the key. It's just a string of characters, apparently gibberish, but it's the same on every machine. You don't even have to copy it, because installing the software installs it. I have yet to hear a good explanation for why it even exists or why I have to treat it as "confidential" (if for some reason your's gets screwed up, you have to reinstall to fix it; I'm not allowed to email it to you).
Even further weirdness... a previous version gave you an option to run a command to enter the number of licenses you purchased, then logged a message any time usage exceeded that limit. It didn't stop you from doing anything, just filled the error log, prompting many calls to support to find out what was going on. And even if we had set it to stop you from exceeding the limit, all you had to do was run the command and set a higher limit! So, in the next version we got rid of that (what was the point anyway?), and got a bunch of calls asking why that command isn't working anymore.
So, not only was there no effective copy protection, but all the licensing issues ever did was generate a lot of calls to support. At least I got some easy ones like that fairly often. :) I have no idea how many people who called support had legitimate copies or pirated copies, or if they were using more copies than they paid for. I had no way to check even if I wanted to find out. I assume enough people were paying to keep it profitable.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
As the old saying goes "No publicity is bad publicity". I have never head of this game but love Civ and MOO (majorly disapointed in MOO3) but I am considering picking it up. The fact my macines CDRom died and I can not play a number of games because of copy protection only makes me happier to find games without such annoyances.
It's pretty stupid that every game I buy I have to find, download, and install a no cd crack. This opens me up to security issues just so that I can play my game. This issue alone encourages me to just download the already cracked versions of the games or to avoid the problem altogether by just not playing games very much. For non-hardcore gamers this kind of thing is enough to keep us from buying and playing games we might otherwise be interested in.
It seems a lossing fight for these companies. The people most likely to make illegal copies of programs are the same people that know how to find cracks. I've never had a game I couldn't quickly find a crack for but it's still a pain. The people who can't find the cracks are the ones most likely to be turned off to buying the games because of these issues.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Every punchline so original...so...so...unexpected
"You must be new here..."
home
All the Starforce customers should gather together and sue Starforce because they obviously are paying for something that's not working. How many "Silent Hunter III" pirated copies are out there now? How many other games that use Starforce are pirated anyway?
From what I understand, it's one of the easiest copy protection schemes to break. If I'm a company that paid good money to implement Starforce into my product to help curb piracy of my game, I'd be majorly pissed off because:
A. It doesn't stop piracy at all and is easy to break.
B. I would be getting a ton of complaints from legit buyers of my game that Starforce has broken their CD or DVD drive capabilities in one way or another.
They should sue them for not delivering a product that works. It's money out the window.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
1. Read repetitive joke on /.
2. Complain
3. ???
4. Profit?
Since the company has demonstrated by its actions that it understands no language but that of the dollar, saying "Bad Starforce! Bad!" is clearly ineffective. Let's put it in terms they can get.
Can I ask everyone who's disgusted by this latest event and therefore swears to join the boycott and purchase no product with Starforce protection to say so?
*Raises hand*
Try it sometime.
Luckily, you can just copy the whole game dir and play.
Yes, I own this game. $99 at the time.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
> Personally I almost bought it purely for this enlightened attitude but it's also a really good game so..
ME TOO
But I liked MOO and Civ so I'm prolly gonna like this one too!
The thing I dont like, the "box sent to you & download" cost as much as the "download only" option.
In Soviet Russia, bad jokes make you!
A while back, in 2003, I downloaded the XIII demo. It was quite an interesting game concept but I didn't buy the game. Around the same time, my DVD reader/CD writer combo drive from Benq quit working--windows would only recognize it in PIO mode, and it made a lot of coasters. I didn't make the connection--instead, I reinstalled windows xp, and bought a new drive. That seemed to fix the problem. I just realized yesterday that the demo probably came with Starforce (most demos also come with it to prevent cracking the demo exe to aid in cracking the game) and hosed my writer just by being installed. Even after I uninstalled the demo, the drive still wouldn't work. The drive is still sitting on a shelf, and I bet it still works if I install it.
There are probably at least thousands of people who got screwed like me.
and so is my middle finger.
FUCK STARFORCE
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
In Russia the game copy protection companies pirate you?
I've been boycotting Starforce for ages, good to see others joining in the good fight :)
Some starforce PR shill (he has about 400 edits on the starforce article and seems to be checking and reverting the articles to positive PR spin daily) is trying to rewrite history on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=StarForc e&action=history .
I wonder how much all of this coverage of GalCiv2 has helped their sales. I could imagine that there are quite a few people that would buy the game, just because it doesn't have Starforce, just to help make a statement. I wonder how many other people have discovered the game, because of this coverage.
Or if you purchase a totalgaming.net subscription for $70, you get 10 tokens. Gal Civ 2 cost 5 tokens, equivalent to $35. You then have 5 additional tokens to use on other games. Depending on what you get, some older titles and indie games run 1-2 tokens. Overall it's a pretty good deal.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
is Legion Arena (RTS with ancient roman units)
Having played a *cough* *cough* "demo" version i went out and bought it precisely because it was NOT copy protected.
And as an interesting sidenote their EULA is one of the simplest, shortest and less screw-the-customer ones i've ever seen.
Oh yeah, and the game is fun too (if a little short with only 10-20 hours of gameplay).
PS: I have no association with the makers of Legion Arena whatsoever, i just believe in rewarding game makers that make good products and are not out to screw the customer.