Ubisoft Dropping StarForce

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dipdude

Forerunner
When it rains, it pours at StarForce

Several websites are reporting that Ubisoft employees have confirmed StarForce DRM will not show up in upcoming Ubisoft titles. Galaad from CelestialHeavens.com (a Heroes of Might and Magic Fansite) claims Ubisoft and Nival are dropping StarForce DRM completely.

The original forum thread (English) contains a Ubisoft employee claiming "We have decided that the anti-copy protection used on the future Ubisoft games won't be the StarForce software" (translated French to English). There was no mention of what DRM would replace StarForce, though comments from other employees among the Ubi forums indicate that no future Ubisoft titles will be DRM-free.

StarForce, the DRM software for several high profile PC games, has been in the news a few times over the last several months. Three months ago, the company drew some attention for a bet made with its users. Comments made by some of the StarForce employees later helped skyrocket the sales of a competing product, and then to round things off Ubisoft sued StarForce a few weeks ago anyway.
 
In a move sure to please gamers everywhere, Ubisoft has confirmed that they will no longer it use the much loathed StarForce copy protection system on their games. As our crack gaming staff reported yesterday, a message on a French Ubisoft forum claimed that StarForce was on the way out. A "Community Manager" named "Ubi_Darkam" told readers that his company "a ? d?d?ue la protection anti-copie utilis?sur les tout prochains jeux Ubisoft ne serait pas le logiciel StarForce." [Trans: "It has been decided that the copy protection used on all future Ubisoft games will not be the StarForce software."] But is it true?

Official word has since come down from company headquarters, confirming that the message is indeed accurate. "Ubisoft has decided to use an alternative copy protection system to StarForce for upcoming releases," said a rep for the company.

The high-profile defection comes only months after an internal Ubisoft study concluded that StarForce posed no substantial problems for gamers, even though tales of dead optical drives and other woes abound on the Internet. StarForce did nothing to help their own reputation, either, responding to criticism with verbal abuse and threats, punctuated by outrageous acts like showing people how to download non-StarForce protected games through BitTorrent.

Ubisoft's dramatic change of heart does not seem to be solely in response to user complaints, though, since these have been going on for quite some time. But a US$5 million class action lawsuit filed last month is new, and may have more than a little to do with the change.

Certainly, copy protection software does little good for the corporate bottom line when it costs a company more in legal fees than it saves in piracy, and it looks as though Ubisoft has decided to bow to its user's wishes now that disgruntled users have begun filing lawsuits. So is this a victory for the little guy? Well, sort of. Clearly, bringing pressure to bear even on large companies can have results, though in this case, the result will simply be that Ubisoft will use a different (and hopefully less problematic) copy protection scheme on its future software.
 
lol the lawsuit was the real cause it seems............Finally someone slapped a 5 mil $ lawsuit on UBi

Code: 
http://eplaw.us/sf/UbisoftComplaint032406.pdf
 
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