[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 @ 18:24 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> I didn't realize StarForce would puke if there were emulated drives
> present *even if the game CD was in a physical drive*.

You mean you underestimated the stupidity of Starforce?  :)

Ubisoft finally bowed under pressure and has abandoned Starforce.

They and Starforce kept trying to claim that few people had problems,
but the truth is a *lot* of people had problems.

Besides that, what it does is just plain wrong, period.

All Starforce or any other protection system does is punish the loyal
buyers, while the pirates just break the protection and use it anyway.

I think the real kicker was in a rumor: Ubisoft sales for one of their
latest Starforce games went *down*, disproving Starforce's ability to
protect sales.  Online polls and user emails indicated that Starforce
was a major "do not buy" signal.

Hopefully the industry has learned something, but being a realist I'm
sure they'll just come up with some new stupidity.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express
it. -- 1984, George Orwell ]]