StarForce DRM "Horror" Stories

[Najila42]

Hello all, I've been doing a little bit of research (besides Modern Vintage Gamer's video on it) on the infamous StarForce DRM (Digital Rights Management) solution, and I'm wondering how bad it really was. What's your StarForce DRM story? Did it linger after you removed all the games with it? How annoying/terrible of an experience was trying to deal with it for you guys? How did you deal with it?

[Master Disaster]

I remember it clearly. Yes once it was on your computer you pretty much had to format Windows to remove it as the official removal tool did nothing, it would say it finished but the drivers still remained present in your device manager. Eventually a third party tool was released that did remove it.

 

As a DRM it wasn't that bad (at least in my experience). I encountered it in 3 games that I remember, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, one of the Colin McRae racing games (or maybe it was Grid?) and X2. It always did was it was supposed to do, I never had any games refusing to launch or anything like that.

 

There were reports of it killing optical drives on some PCs but IIRC it turned out these people had been messing around with the drivers to try and bypass the system.

 

Its one of those things that probably shouldn't have existed but honestly, it wasn't that bad in reality.