Another VERY popular title, Unreal Tournament 2004, actually has the CD check removed when your apply that lastest offical patch. They had done the same thing with the original UT & UT2003.

Hats off to the UT crew!

hip63 :p

I think that because a large majority of players (esp. the European ones) could not care less about PTO, the sales potential was actually lower than for IL-2 series. This goes even with the added sales from the States. Also, as shipped, the game was total crap IMHO. (Poorly selected and too small maps, AI problems, lack of flyable planes as stand alone installation, FM/DM problems, etc.)

The patch that was promised to be ready at release date, or within a couple weeks from release, actually took about (or even more more than) 6 months to be available!

The problems with the US plane manifacturers also lowered the sales potential, too many important PTO planes were unavailable.

My personal opinion is that PF should never have been made, or it should have been made only as stand alone.

Also, if BoB will feature Starforce, I will find another game to play. Maybe this will be a pay-to-play game, been there, done that before. I have had bad problems when I once installed a demo of a game, which also installed SF into my system, and did not uninstall it when the demo was uninstalled. I had to spend hours to uninstall it manually. This is the reason why I have not purchased games like TOCA Race Driver 2, Silent Hunter 3, SWAT 4.

Starforce is not compatible with 64-bit windows, it will not run. Remember this when you plan for an upgrade.

Personally speaking, I don't like having the CD spinning around inside my drive when I play games, so I ALWAYS go looking for a no-cd almost as soon as I get the wrapping off a new game! With some games, this is available BEFORE the game is actually released... so the hackers are clearly better connected than some game suppliers...

We know why people pirate games... they don't want to buy them!

BUT...why do people buy games when anyone with a broadband connection and a CD/DVD burner can pirate them. Simple really... If your favourite game producer ( Oleg Maddox, Epic games ...whatever ) doesn't get any money, they don't make any more games. We pay out money to secure the future enjoyment a follow up title should bring us. IL2 revenue paid for FB. FB money paid for PF.... If no-one had paid out money for IL2 there would not have been follow ups. I am sure I could have enjoyed IL2 just as much if I had pirated it..so it's not purely down to enjoying hte product we have now.

There is also the basic morality element. To pirate is to cheat someone out of their rewards. Under all the corporate software houses and publishers lurks a group of peaople who have slaved away for years to bring us some entertainment. I can't just ignore that.

So..back to copy protection. In general...it has NOTHING to do with why I pay money for a game. I buy it because I want to, and because it's the right thing to do. As has been noted above...practically nothing stops the pirates anyway. Not Starforce...not 'Steam'. Possibly the only thing more annoying than Starforce, and the reason I still haven't bothered with HL2......

Starforce=no purchase

That's it

Same here.

Ditto. To be clear Starforce hasn't disabled any CD/DVD burning software for me. It simply has an error when starting on the games I did purchase from them. No amount of patches I received from them worked. Therefore, any game using their protection is just an expensive coaster for me so there is no point in my buying any game "protected" by it.

Fair enough, problem is while I understand not buying a game with SF, I would never buy a game just because it doesn't have SF. I love naval warfare and subsims...if SF had mucked up my system I'd be mightly PO. Very PO. Playing another game like BF2 (fun though it might be for some) for example would not cut it for me.

I really hope this issue is solved ... and for BoB as well.

I'd rather not play period. Like a blank vote: "none of the above"

Word!

Timochka, are you sure Swat 4 uses SF protection? I have the game and don't recall installing anything other than the game itself and entering a cd key.

I was told it does. But, as I said, I do not have the game, thus no way for me to check.