Sure, they won’t be my employers much longer, but still, I can’t help but feel a swell of pride on the note that Ubisoft is pulling Starforce from it’s products. This makes me happy.

Being part of the MMO bastard stepchild of the games industry, I’ve always been a bit more laissez-faire with the whole piracy thing, but this undoubtedly comes from the fact that games that require serial codes verified on the server you play on are pretty hard to pirate, at least until someone backwards-engineers your client and puts up a ‘grey’ server. Really, piracy may well be the only part of MMO development that is actually EASIER than making a standalone game.

That being said, I understand the urge by the standalone companies to protect their intellectual property – especially for Asia, where piracy is rampant on a ridiculous scale compared to the United States. At any rate, if a publisher feels that some sort of copy protection is unavoidable, it’s nice to choose a partner that doesn’t insult customers who complain about service degradation, threaten to sue news articles that report these problems, or post links to software products that choose to bypass their product.

Which is to say, if your copy protection is generating more news than the game it’s protecting, it’s time to cut the cord. I hope this move dramatically provides a boost to Heroes V, a game whose buzz had previously been hopelessly tainted by the Starforce fiasco.