RE: The whole starforce and optical drives issue.
I suffered two failed drives because of SHIII and Race Driver 2 (Both used starforce).
Both drives eventually gave up on me, refused to write CD's or DVD's and eventually refused to recognise the very games that installed it.
One of the drives I removed and tested in another PC and it worked fine... thus supporting the idea that it's a driver issue... however, trying to reinstall those drivers did absolutely nothing to resolve the problem... Windows simply would not accept drive ever again and it was only when I reinstalled the OS that it worked once more.
The second drive however was toast... and never worked again.
Now that second drive could have expired by other means... but isn't it funny that the 'only' drives that were being reported as failing where cd/dvd writers... nothing else was affected and the connection was refuted by starforce and they even claimed they would pay money to anyone who could prove it... providing you made you own way to Russia with your own equipment and did it there... thus defeating the point of making such an empty gesture in the first place.
Some DRM isn't a bad thing... providing it does not interfere with my experience of the game. I prefer to play offline, got fed up with the amount of smacktards in every game I played... But what Ubisoft are planning is potential suicidal for the company... but I will wait and see.
I refused to get steam when that first arrived... In fact I refused to buy HL2 because of it, and wasn't I thankful after the people who bought it got screwed over the episodic content. But I did eventually install Steam about 18 months ago and bought the Orange box, since then I've purchased a couple more games.. but only budget ones or older titles that were on offer... SHIII, SHIV, Far Cry... revisited some older stuff I used to enjoy.
I don't mind steam now, it's handy to know that I can download the games again to another PC if I wanted too... and Valve are now making more money from steam than they are from games, so I don't think they'll be going out of business any time soon.
If Ubisoft are trying to position themselves as competition for steam, that's fine... but steam allows me to save my games locally and play offline... It doesn't kick me of a game when my connection drops and doesn't demand I am online every time I want to play once it's been activated.
I'm all for some competition for Steam, maybe it will force the prices down rather than keeping them artificially high to avoid them harming retail sales.
But they way Ubisoft are doing this is crazy... and it will only harm sales... which they will no doubt use as an excuse to blame piracy and justify it's use... and then quietly drop it just like they did starforce.
The freetards created the campaigns against some of the better DRM protections... and they won, it's a war that the developers cannot win, only delay... the smart ones seem to get this, the stupid ones seem to be intent on using it as an excuse to create new revenue streams and outlaw resale... Valve did this the smart way, Ubisoft are going down the stupid route.
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