Then again, today cracking SecuROM is still child's play so it's a piss on the ocean really. I think EA's move here is a fairly logical one, by giving this away for free with the default copy protection The Sims 2 series shipped with (Safedisc v3), it would have been like essentially making the The Sims 2 freeware. At least initially.īefore SecuROM and StarForce, making a 1:1 perfect copy of a copy-protected, retail game disc that functioned identical to the original was child's play up until about 2005.Īfter that, with SecuROMs electronic fingerprint that applied a special sequence of dips and mounds into the glass master of the factory-stamped game disc (which a consumer CD/DVD burner could not replicate), 1:1 copies of game discs became impossible and the development of cracks by Scene Groups actually took some time. Honestly, I think the reason SecuROM and StarForce got so much attention when they came out in the mid-2000s is because they genuinely made stuff difficult to crack and copy back in the days when you burnt games for friends. StarForce also caught some flak for allegedly screwing up people's optical drives, but honestly if you read the link by cyssero below, from TweakGuides, that was either a very obscure issue or non-existent.Īll of the compatibility and instability that StarForce and SecuROM did once have with certain optical drives and imaging software has been ironed out with their newer versions of copy protection.
The main issue with them was that they were persistently difficult to remove entirely, if you ended up removing the games that required them (lots of registry keys, hidden folders and bizarre installation paths), which is something they shared in common with the behaviour of a rootkit (ala the infamous Sony BMG Rootkit), but that did not necessarily imply they were. The big hoo-ha over SecuROM and Starforce is something that should be relegated to the mid-2000s. These days every digital content delivery and DRM system you use (Steam, Origin, UPlay, ) is just about as invasive if not more invasive by virtue of being always-online and always phoning home. Would like to know if this is something I should be concerned with or not.
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