Savannah used our news submit to tell us about this article written by PC Gamer Editor in Chief, Greg Vederman, that tells us of his personal experience with problems caused by StarForce DRM that was installed on his machine through a game using the protection. One day, he prepared to play an audio CD in his PC and was surprised when he got the dreaded Windows "Blue Screen" effect, when he tried using either optical drive.
Like a lot of us, he went online and did a little digging, which turned up a possibility that the condition could be due to StarForce. He then deleted the game from his machine, but to no avail. He then had to find and download a StarForce DRM removal tool to get the job done. We have already read that StarForce does not consider it their problem, that the software designer should be the one to ensure that their DRM is removed along with the program. Even Mr. Vederman agrees, but he thinks that the public should be able to know this prior to installation. Of course, this is neither here nor there to an end user. They just get irritated when they have a legitimate purchase that causes such problems.
Now Mr. Vederman has done some digging into StarForce, of how they feel that their software DRM does not affect honest customers and tells of the challenge posted on the StarForce website that is a bit of a "Red Herring" in his eyes.
StarForce Technologies, the company that makes StarForce, seems to think that problems like mine aren't real '” or that, if they are, they're happening only to pirates. Not too long ago, they even launched a contest on their website (www.star-force.com) called 'Prove It!" If you could prove to them that StarForce had physically damaged your optical drive (a long-standing internet rumor), SFT would pay you $10,000. According to them, no one proved it. The contest was a bit of a red herring, though, because I don't think StarForce is physically damaging drives. My guess is that the rumor was started by people who were having problems similar to mine, but who were unable to resolve them because they didn't know how to fully remove StarForce. And why don't people know how to do that? I have to lay the blame at the feet of certain game publishers. Companies that use potentially problem-causing anti-piracy software could do a much better job of getting out in front of these sorts of issues and helping customers resolve them. (Including a FAQ sheet in each game box would go a long way.) As it stands, gamers sometimes run into issues, have no idea why, they can't return the game they just bought because their store doesn't accept returns (because retailers are also concerned about losing money to piracy), and in the end a lot of people are needlessly left out in the cold. |
You can read the article in it's entirety by following this link.
Source: Next Gen Biz
