• General Chat

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

Right. You can make art in proprietary tools. Whatever you export belongs to you. Even if you wanted to share the actual PSD file, that is still your ownership. However, then you require users to have a license for (a recent version of) Photoshop, which may be a barrier to entry. For a full open-source game, I would think it better to use GIMP or Krita or other FOSS tools, that way you can release the original art files to allow people to modify.

Is money made on open source through crowdsourcing and donations then? When I released my linux apps years back I never rec'd anything save I felt good helping out. But sometimes we have bills to pay too.

@jbskaggs said: Is money made on open source through crowdsourcing and donations then?

Also merchandising. For opensource games they could for an example release an art book, maybe something like 'n years of x projects art' or maybe get some figurines made of in game characters and objects, sell those at admittedly a premium but with the clear understanding that some of that premium goes towards paying for the development work and art production. etc. T-shirts are always an option and a rather popular one I recon.

But yes, crowdfunding(a blender foundation innovation! Ton Roosendaal even got a honorary phd for it, well for blender as a whole I suppose but really, for it) and donations are probably the most significant ones.

Mozilla made $496 million in 2020 from Firefox and associated products. Much of this was search revenue, but some from branching out with new services, like their VPN (which is a paid product). You can definitely make a lot of money on open source if you have a popular product. For games, probably your best bet is itch.io and their donation model. But there are other options, like Humble Bundle, etc. (though I think your game needs to be popular first to be included).

2 months later

my free assets get stolen and sold on the net all the time. not much i can do about that really. i dont want to spend my time looking at all the marketplaces and file DMCA s for everything.

The whole thing is silly, as I have statement in this thread already. You can will get hacked, within hours. It doesn't matter what security you have. It's a losing battle and a waste of time and money.

2 months later
a month later

Leveling up the character a hundred times upon starting, hacking into the game to revive dead characters in online games...

I would be happy if we could at least protect variables in the user file.

@Erich_L said:

@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.

Game Dev Tycoon did this.

Seriously, if you post a game on a pirating site... that just defeats the whole purpose, imo.

And cheap. B)

How easy would it be to, say... give the pirates a reason to not get money by posting stuff about your stolen game on Youtube?

I wonder what other ideas we can come up with here?

I like the idea of teaching people about piracy in your pirated game, but sabotaging it, as in the second and third examples could backfire. The kids that pirate the game might just think that's how it normally plays and tell everyone to avoid it.

I've been told that american anime publishers tend to ignore piracy, because the same people that pirate tend to buy the discs anyway. Game piracy seems to be different, but the pirates could still get you publicity, which could be more valuable than money in this business.

@duane said: Game piracy seems to be different, but the pirates could still get you publicity, which could be more valuable than money in this business.

I've known a few people that pirate a game first just to see if it's worth buying and if they like it they go on to buy it. This was around the time when some games that had demos had the demos be made by a completely different studio/subcontractor and the result was that the demo was often a very different game, using same art assets but playing differently. 90s/early 2000's.

I can understand both sides to this topic, honestly. I am just on the lookout for ways to protect our games and assets, or to make the pirates think twice on stealing. Pirates are not always a problem, but they can be.

Perhaps crack a game on a pirating site to keep it playable, but not allow all the features? It's not exactly unplayable then, but it isn't going to reward the thieves with full-on stolen goods, either. Like, say this is Greenheart Games trying to protect Game Dev Tycoon. Perhaps instead of cracking the game so it's nearly unplayable, you could not let the pirates keep a high score or reach the last level... or as mentioned before, save some of the data on a server that the pirate game doesn't have access to?

Make the pirated copy the hardest difficulty only and remove saving support, so ironman and you have to start from the beginning after quitting/closing down the game.

And I'm not sure that posting on a pirate site gets you much other than a possible visit from law enforcement. Why not just publish a free version and say, "You can also buy version 1.5 with all of these extra features?" As soon as someone figures out that your pirate version is crippled, won't they immediately post a copy of the paid version?

A demo might work for honest players. For pirates, they would probably skip the demo and try to snatch it, or snatch it after playing the demo.

Then we experience the pirate version of Game Dev Tycoon IRL, or worse- the cracked version.

Beginner hackers should (hopefully) be easier to stop with information stored to a server or a very long, nasty password that you must have to access the files.

Here's a wild idea -- release the source code of your project on github, but use filler artwork. Then offer a paid version with the full art (which generally has different licensing priorities anyway). You could get code improvements and still have a chance of making money.

Considering most of the game engines are partially or fully free, how valuable is the source compared to the art?

Probably been done before.