No more Starforce for Gothic III

The controversy over the Starforce copy protection scheme looks set to continue after JoWooD announced that it will be dropping it from forthcoming PC RPG Gothic III.

According to a post on the publisher's forum, which won't mean a lot to you unless you can understand German, a different protection scheme will be used instead - one that's a bit more "reliable". Gothic III is due out in September.

Of course, this is by no means the first time that a publisher has dumped StarForce, which has been plagued by complaints of potentially harmful security breaches.

Just last month, Ubisoft ceased its use of Starforce after being hit with a $5 million lawsuit relating to security breaches which allegedly occured because of the use of SF in Ubi games.

In addition, Starforce's creators have previously been accused of posting links to pirate copies of Galactic Civilizations II on their website.