StarForce

» see star-force.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

starforce was the drm name everyone in a turkish lan party recognized by reputation even if not by what it actually did. the system was built by a moscow company that wikipedia records was first known as protection technology, the russian-side reputation was distinct from the western reputation in the way that piracy in the russian market in those years sat at a different angle to the publisher than in the western market. for some reason the company built its anti-piracy product against the harder problem of the eastern market and then sold the same product into the western market where the players were less willing to put up with what the protection required.

to be honest, the headline win was splinter cell chaos theory in '05, which stayed uncracked for 422 days, a long run by the standards of the period. that record was the marketing line for the next year and a half, the publisher pitch was that starforce was the drm that actually worked. back then. the trade-off was that the protection installed a kernel-level driver on the windows machine and the driver did not uninstall when the game uninstalled, which was the part of the deal that the players noticed and the press eventually pried open.

in april '06 ubisoft announced it would drop starforce from all future titles, the gamespot piece on it ran the day of the announcement. cdv followed in may '06 and switched to tages while aspyr media pulled it out of spellforce 2 in the same month. the spring of '06 turned out to be the inflection. the warez group reloaded published the reverse-engineering documentation in march '06 which weakened the technical credibility that the splinter cell record had been built on. the company kept selling into the russian-language market and the legacy western catalog kept the driver around, but the western new-title business was effectively gone by '09.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

this part is the kind of thing an engineering student in ankara would actually look at, because the protection sat at the windows kernel layer and you could see the driver loaded in the device manager if you knew where to look. back then. starforce 3.0 in '03 was the release that set the period reputation. the disc carried a signature pressed at the replication plant that a normal cd-r burner could not reproduce, the kernel driver verified the signature at launch and the loader refused to start the game without that verification (close enough). honestly, the verification was harder to bypass than safedisc was at the same point.

in fairness, the trade-off was visible at the system level. for some reason the driver kept itself loaded across reboots and kept polling the disc subsystem. it also blocked certain debugger and emulation tools that gamers had installed for unrelated reasons. the cd burning community in turkey by then ran nero and alcohol 120%, both of which starforce treated as suspicious tooling and would refuse to run alongside. that was the practical user complaint, you bought the game and the protection turned off other software on your machine.

~ the funny part ~

in '06 a player community on the boing boing comment threads started calling starforce malware in print, the company sent a five million dollar lawsuit threat at boing boing in response. for whatever reason that did not go anywhere. a class-action filed against ubisoft for shipping the protection on a popular title was the legal pressure that moved the publisher tier. ubisoft ran an internal poll on the protection, the player base responded the way you would expect. the april '06 announcement to drop the system on future releases followed.

to be honest, the company response to the criticism was the part that did the long-term damage. back then. the public-facing line treated the kernel-driver behavior as not a problem and treated the player complaints as fud spread by piracy advocates, which played badly in a press cycle where the players had a real grievance about a real driver staying on a real machine. for some reason that response pattern is the one most people remember the brand by, more than the technical record.

~ how it actually ended ~

'09 is the soft date for when starforce as a western-publisher drm choice was past. the new-title pipeline had gone to securom and tages by then. the legacy catalog kept the driver around on the machines of anyone who had bought a starforce-protected game in '04 or '05, and that driver kept surfacing in support forums for years after the brand had stopped shipping. the russian-language market kept buying the protection into the early '10s.

starforce 4.0 added automatic driver removal on uninstall, the company shifted toward a driverless cloud-based protection in the later '00s, the corporate website kept updating into the '10s. for some reason none of that changed the brand reputation, the kernel-driver story was already the story the press wrote whenever the company name came up. starforce as a recognizable western pc-game-drm brand ended somewhere in the '08-to-'10 window, the legacy catalog drove the long tail.

~ what it left ~

the lesson the industry took out of starforce was that the drm could not be allowed to do unbounded work on the player's machine, the kernel-driver pattern was the line. securom inherited the new-title business with a less aggressive driver profile and then walked into its own backlash on the spore install-limit fight in '08. the trade-off between protection strength and player tolerance kept moving and never landed on a stable answer for the dvd-era pc-game catalog.

in '26 the discontinued starforce-protected discs in collector shelves mostly still work on windows machines that have the legacy driver, the no-cd patches for the protected catalog are documented in the same community-maintained repositories that hold the safedisc bypasses. for whatever reason that part is the same as every other dead drm story. the brand is past, the artifacts are not.

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