End of pre owned games

As the power and the blatant anti-consumerism of the corporations increase, so will the size and extent of the black market...

Ever hear of Starforce copy protection? I've only been able to bypass it once and only once as in one loading of the game and then it stopped working. The black market is in trouble if they start to encrypt their games en masse(which will also force users to upgrade their comps as they will need a killer rig just to run the unencryption algorithim in real time). There isn't an Analog hole in games like there is in movies and music. Last time I checked the Casual Black market doesn't have Billions to work on anti-encryptions programs. The future of interactive content does look bleak. I will reward companies who don't use crappy DRM with my dollars but they are becoming few and far between. Last game I bought without ANY copy protection at all was Unreal Tourney 2004.

Yuck.

No, I've never heard of Starforce. I play mostly racing games, and only the offline ones.

So from your brief description, I'd assume that this Starforce is a constant thing in the program? Every time that a command triggers an action in the program, does the code itself have to actually be decrypted, or is it simply a system to check that the command comes from teh "approved" source? What's the key for the decryption? If it's all self-contained (that is, the original program contains the decryption key, which is installed as a part of the installation process), then what protection does it serve? Does it somehow depend on the PC serial number or some such unique identifier?

I'm not sure what sort of morons they've got running the company, but somebody needs to let them know that making potential customers angry is not the way to do business.

Not that I'm saying Brits are bad, but this does seem to have started when they hired that old british guy as chief of the company.

I think the big game industry my be taking a different stance then you all believe. Some Nintendo and Geneses games sell for upwards of $200 on Ebay. Some games have been deamed "classic" and draw in a lot of money from collectors.

The problem with this entire system of classifying games as "collectables" is considerably hinding the gaming industries of putting out quality games. As a new game hits the market, with a new twist, or an entirely different 'engine', then it gets harder and harder to tell what is truly a 'collectable' game from a game that has an entire new angle.

Alot of gamers go off what they're told by these "gamers".

The gaming industry is getting really big.. games are getting epiclike and some are better then blockbuster movies hitting the bigscreen. Doom 3 is a good example. When a movie rips off a game, then you've made a 'classic',

As times go on, these 'epics' could sell for a couple grand a piece.

Biblical prophets sure could see darn well into the future, whether you believe it or not. It has already been prophecied thousands of years that something of nature will come true one day.

Perhaps because mankind's nature is predictable, thus 'prophets' can easily predict such outcomes.

More so as we give up our sense of freedom for the comfort and ease of computers to make decisions for us. Money moguls had already forseen the dependency of computers on our daily lives and it will be thru the computer that mankind will be enslaved for our need for new daily experiences that real life cannot offer.

An entire way of life from our ancestors will be eradicated as more top brains are syphoned off into the computer industry to create a new one over time. No worries, mankind has always been enslaved anyway, we are merely just changing it for a new master. There will come a day when we will go hungry if we do not have a computer at home. Lets hope Deep Blue doesnt measure 6 ft by 6ft by 6ft.

Wow, now there will be even more pirating.