Promising game, unacceptable tactics
I’ve just discovered that Trackmania Nations, the ‘free’ game developed specially for the Electronic Sports World Cup, includes the controversial ‘copy protection’ system StarForce. Numerous reputable organisations (such as Boing Boing, Computer Gaming World magazine and PC Gamer on both sides of the Atlantic) have reported that StarForce causes system instability and can even cause permanent damage to optical drives.
It should be noted at this stage that StarForce deny that their ‘software’ causes such problems – and even threatened to sue BoingBoing for publicising them. As ‘evidence’ that the problems do not exist, StarForce cite a ‘contest’ they held (which finished on the 31st of January this year) which promised $10,000 to anyone who could prove the existence of such problems. Whether this lack of entrants was due to the problems really not existing, or due to the fact that claiming the ‘prize’ involved the ‘winner’ travelling to Russia at his/her own expense, and reproducing the problem on StarForce‘s own machines, is something that I will leave to your judgment.
I’m afraid that, when it comes to the security of my system, and the integrity of my hardware, I don’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt, least of all a ‘copy protection’ company. Since I don’t have any objective (ie third party) evidence that StarForce is safe, I prefer to err on the side of caution.
Make no mistake – Trackmania Nations is a tremendous game, and I was so impressed that I was planning to buy Trackmania Sunrise at some point. That is, until I discovered that it uses StarForce. Why a free game even needs copy protection is beyond me anyway.
UPDATE: If you needed any further convincing about StarForce‘s motives, they posted a link to a cracked version of Galactic Civilizations 2, which is published by Stardock Software and does not use Starforce’s ‘product’.
See Also
- How to detect Starforce on your system (use in conjunction with the list of games below)
- How to remove StarForce from your system
- List of games (and other software!) infected with StarForce
- List of complaints about StarForce (from Slashdot, SysInternals et al, I won’t link them all here)