Directional Pad

Starforce loses a major client

For the past few years, Publisher/Developer Ubisoft has been one of the larger corporations spewing PC games into the marketplace that use the wonderfully overzealous Starforce copy protection scheme. That ends now.

Earlier today, the producer of Heroes of Might and Magic 5 confirmed that HoMM5 will be the first high-profile Ubisoft game in a long time to not ship with Starforce. No reason was given, but I don't think we care about reasons. It's plain to see that Starforce has been getting a ton of bad press recently, and the claims of all the horrible things it can do are finally getting back to the people responsible for putting it in games.

Furthermore, over on the French official forums for HoMM5, an Ubisoft employee mentions that not only will Starforce not be used in HoMM5, but it won't be in any of the "next set" of Ubisoft games. It's still up for debate as to if this means all future Ubisoft games, or all soon-to-be-released Ubisoft games, but either way it's a good thing.

So, hooray. You can all go back to buying Ubisoft PC games now. Oh, and a demo of HoMM5 (which is reportedly way better than the public beta from a few months ago) should be out tomorrow. I'll post some links in the comments once it's out.

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