Directional Pad

Starforce: Piracy Advocates?

This is a very simple and incredibly stupid little story.

Back on the 2nd, Stardock posted some news on their site congratulating themselves over the fact that their latest game - Galactic Civilizations II - was doing quite decently in retail sales, despite being an under-hyped independent release with no super-intrusive copy protection.

A few days later, word of this was posted over at the forums of StarForce, everyone's favourite producer of ridiculously intrusive copy protection whose antics we have reported on previously. Response from StarForce? Well, apparently they just didn't read the link, because their response boiled down to "YEAH BUT PEOPLE ARE PIRATING IT OK AND THAT HAS TO BE BAD!!!!!!" To make things worse, this apparent employee of StarForce then proceeded to link to an active torrent of the game.

As if this wasn't enough, yesterday digg posted and retracted some wonderful "news" based on a blog with a poor choice of words, which implied that Stardock wanted people to pirate Galactic Civilizations II. This resulted in Stardock posting a rather quick response to both issues at once, and showed that Stardock has just about the most level-headed views about piracy as I've ever heard coming from a developer/publisher. Everything gets pirated. This sucks, and there are things you can do about it, but intrusive copy protection like StarForce isn't the answer. The answer is to make reasonably priced games that people actually want to buy.

Now if only we could get more people to think this way.

Source: 1up

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