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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.'"
But if I ever needed a tangible reason to not use Starforce products, this would be enough.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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.
Go ahead; grab a torrent of Gal Civ II. When you're ready to buy it, do so from the website, install Stardock's little management tool, and it will happily go ahead and upgrade your "pirate" install to the latest version with your legitimate activation key, no fuss.
:)
Personally I almost bought it purely for this enlightened attitude but it's also a really good game so..
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
Well what you say makes a certain amount of sense, but here's an alternate view:
First, both good reviews and good developers sound like good reasons to consider buying a game. Good reviews for the obvious reason, good developers because i like to support such behavior. One can make a good theoretical argument that one should judge the merit of a piece of art solely on the basis of the work itself, completly isolated from the context of the artist(s) who made it. Although i understand the reasoning behind the argument i do believe that the actions of the artist should influence your judgement to some degree. If the artist is actively working to bring about changes to society that you disagree with then any interest you have in their work should be mitigated by the knowledge that supporting them will support a cause you disagree with. Likewise if the artist is working to support views you agree with then choosing to support their work in preference to other artists whose work may be technically superior but who are not "fighting the good fight" is a completely valid position.
Furthermore, those who played the first GalCiv already know that Stardock has a history of not only listening to feedback from the players but incorporating those changes into completely free patches and add-ons. Everything they've said so far indicates that they plan to do the same for GalCiv2 as well, which greatly mitigates any fears i have about purchasing an unplayable or even just unenjoyable game. And if you did play the first GalCiv, consider how much you paid for it (about $50 in my case i believe) and how much enjoyment you got out of it compared to other games of the same price. In my case the amount of time i spent playing it and the enjoyment i got out of those hours far exceeded what i gained from many other games that i paid just as much for. Personally i feel i "owe" Stardock more than the original $50 i paid for the first game, and as such paying another $50 for the second game is well worth the risk. If the second game turns out to be mediocre or worse then i can consider my karmic dept for the first game to be repaid and be more wary when and if they release a third game in the series.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
You said it.
Previously, I have defended starforce on the basis that it does do what it advertises; hell I have seen warez forums where people actually complain about how hard it is to get around it. Its not terribly difficult to get past, but most people are too lazy to go through that much effort to play a game, so their approach does work to an extent; they cant stop piracy but they can make it a real pain in the ass. But having bought GalCiv2 the day it came out via their online-delivery system, this type of shit makes me regret my prior defenses. I have no problem that SF wants to make a copy protection, even if its invasive and overbearing, but once they go out and then take a fairly independant game like GalCiv which doesn't have major publisher backing and then hold it out on a stick as an example of the failure to copy-protect, complete with torrent links, that just means you're a giant asshole who gets no sympathy when people attack your products, legitimate or not.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
From what I seem to recall someone on slashdot saying a few days ago on a different thread, the reason that game demos are distributed with the copy protection is that one of the ways the copy protection works is that it installs it's own VM and converts some of the .EXE into a bytecode. This way you have to have the copy protection program running so that it can interpret some of the bytecode in the .EXE. Since interpreting bytecode is slow, a lot of games have that code in the menus and stuff. So if they distributed the demos unprotected, the crackers could take the demo, pull out that bit of code that is bytecode in the retail version, replace it, and therefore make the game run without the copy protection.
Anyway, that's how I understand it based off what another slashdotter said.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
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
Just burn the copies on a Mac or Linux machine.
Piece o' cake.
In other, shorter, words: Judge art solely on its artistic merits, pay for art based on a whole view of what your money gets you and what will be done with it by the person you give it to.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Better yet, have them follow honor rules: only pirate games that have copy protection, and refuse to distribute non-protected games. A bit like the warrior ideal of fighting other warriors but refusing to strike at civilians.
So, does that mean that a hackers debugger is his soul ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I have an SATA optical drive, and Starforce is indeed almost like no protection at all; it quite happily verifies mounted DVD images as legitimate physical disks. In fact it seems significantly more reliable there than with a legitimate disk in a real drive, presumably because the scary barely working hacks they use work better on an emulated drive...
as well as tipping off their web host about a DMCA violation
Starforce is a russian company. I doubt they're concerned about the DMCA.
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.