FrontLine MMOG

The StarForce company, which has already been successfully developing and implementing ultra-modern technological solutions for intellectual property and copyright protection for more than 10 years, presents its brand new product – solution for MMO games area – FrontLine MMOG. The “Nival Online” company has happened to be the very first one to implement FrontLine MMOG into their Russian large scale award winning “Allods Online” game, which currently is entering its final development stage.

It’s not a secret that nowadays the MMOG sector is constantly becoming more and more of first-priority for the whole PC Gaming industry. Incredible success of World of Warcraft has forced developers and publishers to furnish more and more attention precisely to this field. MMOGs are announced pretty frequently and right holders anticipate for projects commercial success. However, there are several negative aspects that may reduce consumer’s interest and are capable bring the revenue down. Experts assert that the losses due to illegal activities within the online game industry have reached $6 million during first half of 2008.

Depending on the MMOG business model, copyright owners run risks to lose considerable part of subscribers or revenue generated by in-game goods sales.

Such aspects as cheating, dishonest schemes, and obtaining advantages using game code bugs result in the forming of a black market of in-game items and characters. In case the copyright holder’s profit depends on the official sales of such goods, an additional competition can affect the sales volume and reduce the income of the whole project. Moreover, hackers will release special utilities for public usage if they get access to the game code study. Such utilities provide various advantages that not correspond with user’s in-game level. This also downgrades users interest, provokes subscribers outflow and reducing project gain.

Obviously, the reliable protection of the game code and traffic against reverse engineering and cracking is the key to solid guarding of game universe, balance and maintaining high players involvement. In addition, it is vitally important to reveal and blockade malware applications like bots in proper time. The necessity of hide MMOG internal design, algorithms and prevent cheating utilities activity, is dictated by project recoupment and profitability.

FrontLine MMOG is the pioneer solution in this field. It is a unique, all-inclusive product, comprised of patented and licensed technologies in the field of program code obfuscation, data protection and application behaviour analysis. The methods, that significantly complicating MMOG analyzing and cracking have been developed long before the first MMOG had been released. They have been improving and perfecting by StarForce during usage on PC games worldwide and have gained the honor of the most reliable and perfect. Application behaviour analyzer, that is used to reveal and barring activity of unwanted programs, has been licensed from S.N.Safe&Software Company, which is known for it proactive computer protection.

FrontLine MMOG comprises of the following elements:

• Game code protection from being analyzed and cracked

• Bots and cheating programs launch and performance prevention

• Protection of the game traffic between MMOG server and client

• Game servers protection from analyzing, modifying and unauthorized facilities launch

«During the “Allods Online” development we’ve investigated several protection methods from different providers”, - comments Sergey Orlovskiy, the President of Nival Online – “Finally we’ve have decided to choose StarForce technologies. Today we are pleased with our cooperation progress and confident of final result.”

«This solution doesn’t appear to be like common copy protection and DRM methods used for ordinary PC games. This is a new word in the intellectual property safety ensuring, that is caused by market trends” – says Irina Mnatsekanova, the Head of StarForce Marketing and PR department – “The balance and integrity of the online universe is the vital factor for maintaining consumers interest towards the game world. If one player uses dishonest ways and gains an advantage over others, it can lead to the lost of motivation for a significant part of virtual world population. In its turn, it will lead to profit loss. Besides this, the right holders should keep in mined the direct threats for their business, such as uncontrolled sales of in-game goods. Moreover, traffic analysis and servers substitution may do a lot of harm for game operators. While the MMOG genre growth rate is constantly evolved, threats will only rise up.”

About Nival Online

Nival® Online is the leading publisher and operator of free-to-play, client-based online games in Russia and other Russian-speaking territories. Nival Online’s mission is to bring the best massively multiplayer online games to the Russian market through internal development and licensed titles.

The company’s first internally-developed title is the eagerly awaited Allods Online™. Allods Online is the MMORPG sequel to the one of the most successful Russian games of the past decade - Allods (known internationally as Rage of Mages). Due to be released in March 2009, Allods Online is the most anticipated free-to-play MMORPG on the market. It has the largest development budget of any Russian game title to date and is being crafted by the highly skilled team that created Heroes of Might and Magic® V. Allods Online received the “Best Online Game 2008” award at the Russian Game Developers Conference KRI 2008 in Moscow, while Nival Online itself won the “Best Developer 2008” award.

Nival Online is also the exclusive Russian publisher of top game titles from the Asian market, including hits like Perfect World™, Granado Espada™, and Pirate King Online™ (branded in Russia as Piratia™). Perfect World is currently the number one online game in Russia.

Headquartered in Moscow, Nival Online owns two development studios in Moscow and Voronezh, Russia. Nival Online was founded in 2006 by Sergey Orlovskiy; the major shareholders are Astrum Online Entertainment and Nival Group.

About S.N. Safe&Software

S.N. Safe&Software Ltd. was founded in 2006 by group of independent investors and since 2006 is successful in selling Safe’n’Sec complex computer protection system in Russia and abroad. The company has got more than 20 Safe’n’Sec distributors worldwide.

Safe’n’Sec is proactive protection system of Host Intrusion Prevention class. It provides reliable protection of the workstations in companies' networks against all types of external and internal threats. Analyzing system applications behavior Safe’n’Sec makes a decision about the malicious actions of the application and blocks the attack on an initial stage. Thus any kind of malware having reached the PC is blocked before starting its intelligence in computer environment.

About StarForce Technologies

The StarForce Company is the expert in software and digital content protection against copying, cracking and unauthorized use. For more than 10 years company have been successfully developing and implementing an ultra-modern complete suite of technological means for copyright and intellectual property protection worldwide. StarForce not only produces and sells software products, but at the same time today the company positions itself as the reliable and responsible Technological partner for those who constantly suffers from computer piracy, unauthorized data access and information leakages.

Self developed Digital Right Management system (DRM), which surely can be integrated with the protection core, unlocks a tremendous opportunity for developers and publishers of digital content delivery and sales management.

StarForce is one of the three leaders in the world’s intellectual property protection market and is the leading developer of protection tools on the Russian multimedia and business software markets already for many years, that is well known for its high piracy level.

For further information and press contacts:

pr@star-force.com