The Era of Shiny Disks

The arrival of the CD-ROM meant that games that previously required dozens of floppies could be shipped in a single jewel case, and opened the door for new multimedia possibilities in game development. But it also brought with it the CD-RW drive, capable of duplicating massive (at the time, anyway) amounts of data quickly and easily. It was a software pirate's dream.

The response to this development from a copy protection standpoint was technological in nature. The first salvo was the use of unreadable disk sectors or other hidden files that could not be read or accurately duplicated by the software used to copy CDs at the time. Of course, this was rapidly made obsolete by the development of software that could read and copy an entire disk. So software companies turned to schemes like SafeDisc and early forms of SecuROM designed to make copies of discs that used the systems unreadable.

Unfortunately, many of these methods run up against one of the fundamental issues that has caused PC games developers headaches over the years: Compatibility. Simply put, it is impossible to create a mechanism that is going to work with every system setup or optical drive on the market. This has led to controversy when gamers who legitimately purchased titles like The Sims 2 and BioShock have been unable to play them thanks to the incompatibility of their hardware, anti-virus software, or other system components with CD-based copy protection.

None off this, however, has engendered quite the outrage brought on by system-side copy protection solutions like StarForce. Very difficult to crack but also difficult to remove on uninstall of a game, these mechanisms have been accused by outlets from the lowest tech blog to gaming comic Penny Arcade to CNet of executing a malware-level invasion of a system on which they are installed. Given that there are documented cases of system performance degradation thanks to remnant StarForce code, it's easy to see why solutions like this have become extremely unpopular even among consumers who have no interest in pirating or sharing games.