US-ACTION Company is one of the biggest computer games distribution companies on the Czech market. The company runs the complete, professional localization team and maintains the largest distribution computer games network delivering the goods into almost one thousand retail stores.

US-ACTION hit the market in 2001 when introduced its first set of children games ‘Maja the Bee’ and ‘Hugo’ series followed by very hot and successful games action ‘Codename: Outbreak’, car racing ‘Rally Xtreme Championship’ and award winning adventure Runaway soon. All the products were fully localized into the Czech language. The very first problem we had to deal with was how we were going to protect our products? How can we prevent our games from being illegally copied and how to secure our profit?

After a long consideration we have decided to protect our very first "true" games with young and very promising StarForce protection system. Soon StarForce turned to be very reliable and almost unbreakable protection providing a perfect anti-piracy safety of our portfolio. Of course we were interested in the efficiency of the protection and a large survey revealed a wonderful result: one can illegally download almost any game except for our localized CZ versions! This simple fact has greatly increased the value of our software on the market as well as our professional prestige.

After such a great experience 90% of our software portfolio was protected with StarForce protection system. The practical reliability of the protection had quickly spread around and we noticed that many of our business partners decided for the StarForce solution as well. That naturally greatly increased, beside the safety of course, the work coordination efficiency (e.g. patches implementation) and the professional relationship and partnership.

Of course it would be unfair to miss the hot and not-so-nice topic of StarForce being a spyware or a destructive program. The whole case, we could recently read on many forums about, did not harm the good name of the StarForce company only, but on the first place it seriously damaged the games, its distributors and, what is most important, the legally paying customers.

As every other company, we had to act somehow. After a careful study and expertise we have come to the similar conclusion as our fellow distribution companies using SF protection: if there is a possibility, that SF protection might cause some incorrect system behavior, according to the requests to our technical support department the total rate of the complaining customers is almost zero. On one thousand tech. support requests there are two requests related to the protection problems. Furthermore, those requests very often sound like some principal antipathy to the protection in general as all the complaints are based on mere guesses. We have no real and legal proof that SF can undermine system’s stability.

And I say, if anyone can prove it, go straight on the StarForce headquarters, where you will get a financial reward for such a proof. If you are an IT expert, do not waste you energy with special press articles and fly to Moscow to get some real action. I would not like to raise any guesses or speculations, but as for me StarForce is trying to do their best and for some unknown reason to me, they might have become a victim of unfair propaganda aimed to discredit StarForce. Who knows?

Looking forward to the bright future!

Eduard Rojicek
US-ACTION CEO Czech Republic