[news=http://www.star-force.com/images/t_logo.gif]As most of us here at Neowin are aware, Stardock published their highly anticipated, turn-based strategy game "Galactic Civilizations 2" last week to rave reviews from most of the major gaming sites. Stardock decided not to include any copy protection scheme with the release, much to the surprise of the gaming community at large. No Starforce, SafeDisc or SecuROM to hinder any sort of unauthorized distribution.
We get a report today that the folks over at the Starforce camp have taken notice of the game and its apparent retail success without employing a copy protection scheme. In a thread over on the Starforce forums, a member posted a link entitled "Game published without copy protection isn't commercial disaster", clearly trying to evoke some sort of reply from the copy protection powers that be. A member of the Starforce admin staff immediately posted a link to a well known torrent site hosting illegal copies of GalCiv II, in an effort to show how many sales are being lost by not using copy protection. We caught up with Brad Wardell of Stardock this weekend for some reaction to this rather humorous turn of events:
"I don't claim to be incredibly informed on warez. I don't pirate stuff so I am not familiar with sites that people go to in order to find, amongst other things, warez. I was not familiar with the site they linked to. I suspect I'm not alone. We cannot understand why they felt the need to provide an actual URL rather than state the obvious -- that like all software, ours is being pirated at some level.
We obviously don't want people to pirate our software. Every time someone pirates it who might have possibly bought it we feel the pinch. We're a small company so every sale counts. We simply think there are other ways to go about it than to inconvenience customers with CD-based copy protection."
Our question is fairly simple: Why would a company that invests so heavily in preventing software theft from occurring, choose to point people directly at a site which promotes the exact opposite? Stay tuned as this story develops...
View StarForce Thread
StarDocks Response to Starforce
Source: http://neowin.net/[/news]
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