The Ubisoft forums has an employee stating that their upcoming turn-based strategy game, Heroes of Might & Magic 5, will not feature Starforce’s product in the game. At their French forums, they indicate that they will not use Starforce for future titles either.
With the negative publicity not only from gamers, but from the industry (Computer Gaming World published an article in this month’s issue that didn’t put Starforce in a positive light), it seems it has reached the beancounters at Ubisoft. Whether or not the above statements are true remains to be seen.
Update: The French statement is translated as, “It’s been decided that the anti-copy protection software used for the upcoming Ubisoft games will not be Starforce.”
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Finally… heck even on my God PC I would never put Starforce on it…
I too have to say Finally.
Something must of happened then, I was in the beta for that and the beta has Starforce in it.
Wow, even beta had Starforce? I wonder what they hoped to accomplish by doing that?
BTW I digged it.
According to this French forum post, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for the PC won’t have Starforce, either.
In the post about Gearbox’s new Brothers in Arms game, Randy Pitchfork who works at Gearbox said this (see comment #6) when someone mentioned Starforce (BiA is published by Ubisoft):
Darn, I started developing an exploit that can be used with starforce. I am making it like a worm virus that spreads and once infected to machines with starforce it will restart the computer once any key on the home row is pushed
Very small file size too!
Oh thank your various gods. I love the ubi suite of games but the friggin starforce that they put on annoys me no end.
Now I just want patches to be released cutting starforce out of the older games.
-Aeq
Starforce is one of the reasons I stopped buying games. Steam being the other.
Its demise can only be seen by the customer base, and the industry at large, as a huge leap forward.
Why the hell should we be forced to run extra software on our machines just to play games we have legitimately obtained? That we have paid our hard earned money for? Its moronic, and until it ceases completely myself and many other’s like me will not be spending any money on games.
There is a huge back catalogue of old PC games, emulated stuff and freeware to play, why would I pay people to bork/slow down my box?
The reason that starforce is put into a demo is to prevent hackers working a crack around the protection before a game is released, starforce encrypts .exe and .dll files, so they put in on a demo for increased security. (basically: this stops hackers studying the demo code to figure out how the real game works)
ubisoft tres bien!
those guys are nothing more then thugs who extort customers and game makers. I applaud you!
Doh I hope they go ahead with it!
Sweet! I have stopped buying games with starforce so this is good news to me.
Good Bye Starforce, you suck!!!
Starforce requires even Betas and Demos to have Starforce, if the eventual product will. In theory, this prevents people from cracking Starforce. In actuality, all it is is a nice way to get your rootkit trojan masqurading as DRM onto as many PCs as possible.
Don’t think it’s a rootkit? The latest versions of Starforce force your computer to reboot if you open up Nero or any IMAPI (CD Burning) software with a Starforce protected CD in the drive. This is not “DRM” anymore, it’s “We feel we own your PC, so we can decide what runs and what doesn’t.”
star force sucks balls
I think we need to file a class action lawsuit against starforce. If my son left one of his games in the PC and I go to backup my work data to a CD and apoun open up nero, my PC crashes, Im going to be one very pissed off camper.
Someone should make a game based on starforces company building. The goal is to assisinate all the workers as they leave their building.
[...] News Ubisoft Dropping Starforce Afghans selling US army secrets on USB Drives Blizzard Bans 5,400 WoW Users and Suspends Over 10,000 More Lucent Technologies Sues Microsoft Over Xbox 360 Battlestar Galactica game under consideration Spy Hunter movie script leaked? 1930’s Noir Title announced for Revolution – Entirely in Black and White Vista Aero Unavailable for Pirates Girl’s heart restarted after ten years Coca-Cola with Real Coca Leaves Bottled by Indigenous Tribe 200 GB Blu-Ray Drive? Sega Handheld is April Fools Joke ‘South Park’ Creators Skewer Own Network [...]
[...] Well, we heard it from their forums, but now Ubisoft has told 1UP the official word on Starforce. It looks like all the complaining has gotten to the suits. When questioned Ubisoft represnetatives told 1UP, “Right now, Ubisoft has decided to use an alternative copy protection system to Starforce for upcoming releases and we are investigating other possible steps at this time.” [...]
If your PC is crashing when you open up any burning software then you got other problems, starforce running or not.
UBISOFT is a joke with or with out starforce,
I bought a game Blazing Angels and have had it for 5 months and haven’t been able to play it yet. It doen’t map joystick correctly and everyone was bitching about it so they put out a patch that did nothing to fix any of the problems and so ther was more bitching and yet another patch has been released and it also does nothing, I mean realy …who would put out a flight sim that won’t see a joystick right this is totaly stupid and they can’t even get it right after 2 patches I have 5 joystics and all diff makers and none of them work right on this game so I can’t get my money back because it is open software so what i did just to make me feel better is go to the nearest best buy and bought another copy and scratched the shit out of the disk and took it back as defective disk and did this to every copy on the shelf they kept replacing with the same disk so i kept giving them back the same problem hehehe
I got 5 copies and wrecked them all so now there will be 5 people out there that don’t have to suffer the same crappy gamming shit from UBI
http://www.glop.org/starforce/
this will help ya learn about starforce and what it is and what it can do to realy mess up your computer and your sanity
Azazel I think u need to read a bit more befor making a comment like that starphuck is bad ok
[...] News Ubisoft Dropping Starforce Afghans selling US army secrets on USB Drives Blizzard Bans 5,400 WoW Users and Suspends Over 10,000 More Lucent Technologies Sues Microsoft Over Xbox 360 Battlestar Galactica game under consideration Spy Hunter movie script leaked? 1930’s Noir Title announced for Revolution – Entirely in Black and White Vista Aero Unavailable for Pirates Girl’s heart restarted after ten years Coca-Cola with Real Coca Leaves Bottled by Indigenous Tribe 200 GB Blu-Ray Drive? Sega Handheld is April Fools Joke ‘South Park’ Creators Skewer Own Network [...]
To defend any such cd protection as some here have, is lame. I am sick and tired of purchasing software that installs CRAP wether I want it to or not, or bogs down my system to no end. EVERY protection made to date has a crack, or work around. So much for protection. The people who DO steal know how to work around all protections. The honest people who actually BUY their games are less informed about hacking/cracking, and are most affected by this crap. Time for software companies to go back to tried and truthful ways of marketing their software if they wish to make a profit.
1)Offer software at a realistic (yet profitable) price. Ever see a game list at prerelease for $50…….then drop to $35 when it actually comes and they don’t have the pre-orders they expected? 2)Offer “Bonus” addons with retail packages. Coupons for freebies, holograms, or collectable pieces for true gamers. Coupons for free addons via web, ect…