• General Chat

  • Let's talk about game resource protection. Contrary opinions welcome. :)

I am posting this thread to give people a place to post the "why would you want to do that?", "why bother?" and similar opinion-type posts concerning Game-Resource protection. As mentioned by @TwistedTwigleg in my technical post on this subject:

Just a reminder to anyone wishing to have this type of argument/debate/discussion: Please keep it civil and respect others when posting, even if you disagree with their opinion/idea/etc. It is fine to talk about topics like this, and to share your opinion on something, but please be respectful when participating in discussions, even if it is in the appropriate section of the forum, like the general chat section.

Another important point; I am not a lawyer or legal expert. And I strongly urge anyone reading anything in this thread to assume that no one else here is either. Do not take anything you read here as being legal advice. Govern yourselves accordingly. ;)

Just an FYI, if you are interested in this subject and you live or do business in the United States of America, then you should look up the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To the best of my knowledge the DMCA is nearly a primer for US digital intellectual property law.

Personally, I don't care what people do with my game. I mean, I can understand wanting to protect your investment, but we see over time that these protection measures usually just cause hassle to legitimate customers and the pirates easily hack the code in short order and post the game online for free anyhow.

For example, there were older DVD based games that used a form of online DRM but years later this broke and caused the games not to work. Can't recall which game it was, I think Bioshock 2 had a problem like this where I actually had to go download a cracked exe just to play a game I paid for.

I've actually considered uploading my game (when I finish it) to pirate sites myself. I would rather more people play it, and I'm not sure there is a direct connection to sales (meaning the people that pay for media always pay, and pirates always pirate). There was an article once talking about how popularity on pirate sites actually increased sales, since more people were playing, making videos, posting online, and otherwise promoting the title. I could believe it.

In your case, I'd be interested to know what the risk factors are. Meaning, what exactly are you trying to protect against? The answer to this would make a difference. Do you want to stop people from stealing the textures or models and using it in another game? Users pirating? Cheaters?

I mean, I have heard about developers having their whole game ripped off (especially on mobile) where they might steal assets or decompile and reskin a game, or even just submit the same title with a different name. Usually you can work with Apple/Google and have these removed if you find them. The IP-thieves in these cases are usually in countries outside the US, so there probably isn't too much you can do legally to punish them, but it is a fair worry.

@cybereality said:

In your case, I'd be interested to know what the risk factors are. Meaning, what exactly are you trying to protect against? The answer to this would make a difference. Do you want to stop people from stealing the textures or models and using it in another game? Users pirating? Cheaters?

My main concern is the reality that the use of third party intellectual property comes with some legal risks. The main safeguard against the legal risk is to ensure that someone who accesses that i.p. has to break the DMCA in order to do so. It isn't an absolute protection but it is considered by many to be a a very good way to protect yourself legally. It is almost as if someone wrote the act with that in mind....

I don't have a specific use case beyond third-party i.p. though. other than that I am looking at the long-term. I am an engineer by nature, I want to be able to estimate what I can do with something before I actually start prototyping. The only assets I have paid for right now do not have any particular requirement regarding security. But what if I found some that did? If I have already locked myself into an Engine that cannot support it at all... That would be a severely limiting factor, right?

I am also considering what it would take to implement this capability in a cross-platform kind of way. But it wouldn't hurt to know what other people are working on first. Maybe someone else is already working on something. If so, maybe I should be helping them?

But how will I know if someone is working on something? By posting in the forums and waiting a bit to see who posts about it. :)

Just my opinion WRT copy protection:

While it makes sense to want to protect your assets, considering that as @cybereality said, these protection mechanisms tend to be broken pretty quickly usually, it probably isn't worth the investment for small indie developers.

Then again some of the third-party solutions do offer special pricing for indies, so up to you to make that calculation for yourself, however note that most indie developers are lucky to even make any small profit at all.

And even at a discount these copy protection solutions can easily eat right into those profits. You might be actually better off just spending the money on marketing instead.

For a big publisher/studio the calculation is different, since there's more money to afford this to begin with, and the main concern is to, in particular, protect the initial launch window: when most of the sales are typically made anyways.

WRT preset assets bought for use in your game, I don't think I've ever seen asset packs require them to be encrypted, but if you do find such an asset/pack you need to consider if the cost to use it isn't too high, if not, all the power to you.

I like this topic because I find myself coming back and asking it myself over and over again. The best way to do it is to offer some part of the game on a server, like matchmaking. But then just hide some DRM there. Hitman 2 took this too far and nobody even seemed to mind, which is that they require an internet connection to sign in even though it's just single player.

The more common way to do it is to use a distribution platform like steam. Steam is DRM and will do a pretty good job of preventing the game from running without paying for it.

Anything beyond that like code obfuscation has been said to be somewhat of a waste of time because the barrier of entry for someone who wants to read your code isn't very much higher than it would be with just regular compiled code.

I gave some thought to this. I have so far been exporting all my projects as a .wasm files for HTML5 based applications. I haven't done much research on the subject, but how hard is it to read a .wasm file? Do you need to hex edit it like a .exe or ?

I think in the future tokenization of a key that returns the value of a Certificate of Authenticity on some block chain would be the solution. That's beyond my skill level though.

Looks like it is possible to decompile WASM files, if this GitHub repository is anything to go by: The WebAssembly Binary Toolkit

That said, it looks like it is mostly source code that is accessible through decompiling, so assets like textures and the like may be safe. I wasn't able to find anything relating to decompiling outside of source code, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible, though as far as I can tell it would be harder to access than say a .zip file or .exe.

That's a really great point. Resident Evil 2 has a huge modding community, and I bet most of those models are stolen from other games, and are of a quality I doubt any of us here could reach. So people would likely just steal those AAA assets and not our little indie game. Also, having all those mods probably increases the popularity of the game, and it could even boost sales (my same argument about piracy).

2 years later

I don't know about you, but in my opinion there is nothing worse than cheaters and ddosers. I can understand people who don't want to pay money for a game because it's too expensive or too short. This kind of pirates usually find hacked or better to say pirated versions of games. At the same time, such people do almost no harm to anyone, of course, except for the publisher of the game who loses profit because of this. But I will never be able to understand the actions of hackers and ddosers? The publisher specifically makes the game free so that literally everyone can play it. Why do ddosers break the game servers, and hackers continue to create an infinite number of cheating software and programs? Why bother the same players as you?

dudosers

I haven't seen that term before. From the context, I guess it's related to DOS - Denial of Service attack?

@cybereality said: Personally, I don't care what people do with my game. I mean, I can understand wanting to protect your investment, but we see over time that these protection measures usually just cause hassle to legitimate customers and the pirates easily hack the code in short order and post the game online for free anyhow.

I’ve always wondered, why not pirate your own game and upload it? You could make a different version that let the player get 99% through the game then have actual 3d pirates come steal your progress at the end. People would want both the real and your altered version!

I also wonder where the ethical line is if one wanted to be a little more malicious...? You could change the engine to let you let you edit files and make a bad version of the game that change’d every file name of the user’s into Portuguese. I mean the word Portuguese not the language.

That's an interesting marketing strategy. You could pose as the hacker and offer the hacked game for a "discount" price.

Actually, when I release a commercial game, I plan to upload it to pirate sites for free myself. The hackers will hack it anyway in a day, so there is no downside, and I would prefer people that can't afford the game to be able to play it without getting a virus on their computer.

I discovered that any games that are popularly pirated end up having better orthodox sales. People will download the pirated version then buy the game if it's good. Of course Spore showed just how fast the most expensive and neurotic DRM is bypassed.

I will rarely buy a game unless I can play a demo first. There is just too many crap games out there to trust the marketing.

Imitation and theft are well human standards. Successfully defending your intellectual property is like trying to step on the same piece of river twice. For example the theft of "rounded corners between Apple and Microsoft (??) ran into the millions of dollars over something consumers did not care about.

My wife created a vector at of a celtic wolfhead almost 8 years ago. It was stolen and she successfully defended it for about two years but soon grew overwhelmed as it proliferated to literally 1000's of sites. As of today it has been in movies, documentaries, tattoos, books, video games including Skyrim- and here recently she was accussed of stealing her own art. Yet with all that popularity she made no money on that project. Kinda like publically traded NFT's if it can be seen it can be stolen.

Here's an article showing how Denuvo reduces performance of games: https://technoeager.com/why-does-denuvo-affect-pc-gaming-performance/

The irony is that, because the legit version was slower and buggier, people actually pirated the games more because the bootleg version was a better experience. So these big companies like Capcom and Ubisoft, spent a ton of money licensing and implementing DRM, only to reduce the profit from the game and promote piracy (and the games were cracked in a few days anyway so it made little difference). Except then paying customers received a worse experience than freeloaders.

Someone stated before that licensing is more effective than DRM- as for some reason many pirates seem to honor DRM free product's licensing agreements.

In engineering field I remember back in the 80's and 90's having LPT1 serial port key modules that had to be plugged into the port between computer and printer to use the software. Software theft was not an issue really- they rented those keys and if you didnt pay the yearly fee your software was locked down. So it was a way to force money rolling in.

Their competitor soon offered a similar windows based system system with zero drm, keys, whatever and it sold like hot cakes and put the first company out of business- even though the first company had the superior software the 2nd company was loved more by their customers.

6 days later

I personally like to open-source my games, because (in no real order): - since piracy makes games more popular, i think it's a good idea to make what's normally considered piracy count as legitemate downloading - it might be great to see other developers use my projects to help them make their projects - my backup drives might be too inaccessible (e.g. i'm doing a game jam so looking through a hard drive is too slow, or my currently-used computer is outside of my home where the backup drive always is), so having a public backup that i can just download is great.

the downsides are that - i can't use paid assets because otherwise my game's source code would be a place where you can pirate these assets, and that - i have to disallow certain software tools (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) so that i can open-source the game art

but i think it's worth it.

Yeah, going full open-source is an option, if you create everything yourself. It becomes an issue if you license the art or music, because then you can't release those assets with the code.

I also like the Itch.io model, where you can suggest a donation, but allow anyone to download for free. I don't think the game will make as much as a fixed price on Steam, but you have more people playing, and more potential to get popular (if the game is good). Also, you don't lock people out if they are young and/or broke and can't afford your game.

@Sosasees said: - i have to disallow certain software tools (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) so that i can open-source the game art

That shouldn't really be an issue tho.

edit: I mean in and of itself. Arguably it's of course a good idea to use a open source DCC and it's open file format so others can contribute and make modifications without barrier to entry but in legal/licensing terms it shouldn't really be an issue.