The problem with Starforce and other such software is that it's not always stable. Granted, the games themselves are not always stable, but I'd personally rather that the game is unstable because of itself and not because of some third-party software. At least that way the developer is not at the mercy of that other company to fix problems.

My question to the GC2 developers is: In your opinion, is it cheaper to have a programming team that creates frequent updates (and also making more content thus making the game better) than it is to subscribe to some form of copy protection scheme?

It's far better to have no copy protection on the CD in terms of support. Ubisoft made us put copy protection on the Political Machine and it was a support nightmare. 

There were a lot of little bugs in the game that weren't immediately obvious during the first week the game was out. The game played fine, and you could win, but in reality some of the racial and governmental bonuses weren't working right, and so it was harder than it should have been.

So now anyone who has a version that was hacked from the first week is getting a semi-hampered game, and there are probably further issues they won't fix right away, like the misaligned/directed connector points on ship models. If they just wait a few more weeks to patch those then lots more illegal copies will be messed up that way while the rest of us are fine!

It's far better to have no copy protection on the CD in terms of support. Ubisoft made us put copy protection on the Political Machine and it was a support nightmare.

A fair point. However, while you were in your nightmare (as support and maintainance often are), the game designers were able to move on to other projects.

I don't think the case is nearly as cut and dry as people try to make it out to be. Draconian DRM mechanisms like StarForce are a bad idea in and of themselves; they don't need the StarDock mechanism to act as a comparison for it to be a bad idea.

In the middle, I don't have a problem with light DRM techniques, like requiring the CD to be in a drive. Even when I'm not using Daemon to mount disc images of a game, getting up and using the disc is hardly an onerous problem, particularly for PC games where making the game run is often far more challenging.

On the other side, I don't see StarDock's updating mechanism as being a decent global solution either. As I mentioned in another thread, it only really works for a certain kind of game (games that have finite content quantities of content). Imagine Zelda: Ocarina of Time being released under the update mechanism. The developers constantly tweaking encounters, changing AI, maybe adding a new creature here, altering a boss fight there, etc. It makes it feel like the primary release of the game was actually a beta, thus exacerbating one of the general problems with PC game development (that is, the idea of using the initial release as a beta test, and patching later).

Ultimately, the general solution is for developers to just let it go. Implement some light DRM, perhaps, and be done. Accept that there's going to be some piracy and move on.

Oh, you mention that Ubi forced DRM on you. The proper response would have been to make a few presses of non-DRM CDs. When a customer complains, get their info and mail the disc to them.

Maybe put a serial in one of the game files. If the game got into the wild, you'd know who got that disc and where they live.

Here's my story and attitude towards copy protection, piracy and whatever.

I met GalCiv2 first through a bittorrent download. The uploader was pretty enthusiastic about the "Optional step: serial" and I though "what the WHAT ... gotta try this". Downloaded and played through a couple of times.

Second thought was: "man these people who developed the game are really nice people and they're treating everyone as adults ... there are no threats". A pretty weird experienc after having tried copy protected CDs and games.

So I bought the game (loved the fact that it was EASY to pay), got the serial and am looking forward to getting a couple of fixes for the errors in the game (like crashing if loading/saving or even if you have Laser III the Shipyard still insists that there a no available weapon techs (until you quit and reload)).

I know StarForce says no one buys the game BECAUSE it's not copy-protected. Well, I did

To the company and the developers: