So who's to blame then : Microsoft, Starforce or SimBin ? Or me ? It's me isn't it ? In better times my problem (which is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things) would either not have even been possible or would have been crushed as soon as it had once raised its ugly head. What is being done about this - nothing ? You have the same situation recurring : make your money, make sure you know how to exploit loopholes in the law and that you employ someone who's good at chicanery and then move on to the next 'enterprise', leaving loads of angry people in your wake.

I have complained before now about how corrupt this industry is in so many ways, and without understanding everything in detail like some people seem to do I always knew I was right anyway, but now that this has happened I know for sure. It is absolutely INCREDIBLE that no-one can be held to account for this and that it supposedly all my (the gamer's) fault. But why oh why should I have to do this and why, when it goes pear shaped, is it all supposedly my fault when it clearly isn't ? I agree with your approach towards installing games and in future before attempting to install any CD version of a game I will google '(game name) + Windows 7' before I attempt to even install it, and will probably have to do umpteen hours' worth of research before I can be sure that it is safe for me to attempt to install it. I'm sure there are ways around it, but because of my rather enormous game library I have just settled on not buying more games burdened by Starforce and getting rid of the few that I bought in the past. I'm just cursing myself at the moment for being so incautious as to have pressed Yes.ĪlKim: I haven't owned many games protected by Starforce, but I have never played any of them either because of problems with the DRM (nothing as catastrophic as yours, just the game refusing to install, launch, play, uninstall and what have you). So basically it is going to cost me money to bring in outside help. All I know is that it is now my problem and that I have nowhere near the required level of knowledge to resolve it. But I really don't understand this situation in detail as some do because I'm just a gamer who likes to play games. In other words, as per usual, it's pass-the-buck and no-one is responsible. I've read a few posts on the net about this and everyone seems to think that everyone else is responsible.

This is entirely the game's developers' / publishers' fault for being lazy and not setting up a proper system to do updates to the installation files before they are installed, as Starforce provides them with free 're-protection' or whatever they call it.

And there is absolutely nothing scary about this, it is like installing an outdated driver for whatever hardware, and then that driver messing up the system. Elenarie: And if you didn't install the copy protection, the game wouldn't have worked at all.

Starforce protection driver windows 7