We’ve discussed this before in a number of threads where people were trying to decide whether or not to encrypt their games, or whether they should even use Godot because they weren’t sure encryption is good enough.
From the article:
In a Reddit thread where a user asked if the developer planned on preventing people from stealing its assets or code, Mega Crit lead programmer Jake Card had an unexpected response. “Honestly, we don’t really,” Card wrote. “We figure people who want to pirate it will find ways to pirate it, so there’s no reason to waste dev resources on it.”
In another Reddit thread, where someone pointed out that anyone could decompile Slay the Spire 2 to look at its source code, Card seemed perfectly content with the prospect. “It’d make me extremely happy to find out that other game developers learned something from reading through our code and our scenes :),” Card replied to a comment suggesting that Slay the Spire 2’s open-source nature could be valuable for other game developers.
I agree, that spending your time trying to lock your game down is a waste of time.
That is an interesting article, and their viewpoint is refreshing, but I am not sure many game companies would agree. To see your work rapidly appear for free because it was so easy to hack is not really something we should take sitting down. But I think it was reading your earlier posts, @dragonforge-dev, about this that changed my mind about caring.
I decided a while ago to not worry about it until Godot itself decided to implement something to do it for me. When the Godot team take it as an issue to address, I will use whatever tools they provide, but in the meantime, it’s not something I want to spend my time worrying about. However this is not the attitude any board of directors is going to take, Slay the Spire aside, and this could be one factor in a decision not to use Godot for big budget titles. I remember the concern it caused me when I realised games could be easily deconstructed back to scenes and code etc and I am sure this is something everyone goes through. I am not sure a profit focussed commercial board would be so easy to overlook it.
But I am no expert in these things, and agree, it really isn’t something to concern yourself about. It took a while, but I am now comfortable at least knowing that virtually anything can be hacked in one way or another.
I look forward to trying slay the spire, it looks like a good game!
Been my stance on the topic for 20+ years. Might have lost a job or contract or two back then for talking about it frankly with the wrong suits…
It’s a red herring especially for (new) Indies with already limited resources.
Cheers, keep on devin’ !
lol Aye. As far as i see it, i just use that as an excuse to write stupid notes in my code.
Back in the day, things were definitely NOT encrypted. Its really inevitable that someone will eventually break into all our game’s code.
(whether in 10 years or 30 or even 50 years. Tech always advances, not that the advancement would help with unencrypted code hacks.)
I haven’t released a game yet, so I can’t have an educated opinion on piracy.
However, I don’t think piracy is going to apply for my project, Monkanics. As the game is gonna be free. What is there to pirate? The crappy netcode that anyone can already replicate?
I already share so many snippets of my code from my questions on this forum, my blog for Monkanics, and heck, I might even open source the game.
Also, any art assets are auto protected by copyright in the US, so I’m fine there. And if anybody really did try and steal art assets for a commercial project specifically, they’ll get a negative reputation automatically.
I can even go a step further and add a license to the game. Something like copyleft, but I’m getting to ahead of myself.
Edit:
I thought about this for a few more minutes. I realized that, for commercial projects, anybody who wants to pirate/decompile the game weren’t going to buy the game to begin with. So they really aren’t losing sales.
Also, If your game is good enough that someone wants to tinker with it, isn’t that a win? Someone who didn’t have to care, cared, and went the extra mile for your product.
In my personal opinion, as a bit of an old-timer, piracy can’t be combatted. The community is so much larger than any dev team, as is evident if you do a torrent search for any title at all. Even doing online-only is hopeless for single player titles. This is the main reason MMORPGs and the like exploded around 2000 - only makes sense on big servers, and it’s that sweet, sweet subscription money, where players buy the same game over and over.
Professionally, it’s often not up to the developer to worry about - if you have a publisher (I’ve worked mostly with EA), they have the money, so they have the power, and they only understand sales. To be honest, the disconnect between publisher and developer is the main reason I quit the industry. I’ve worked with a 5-man dev team, and on the publisher side they had more PRODUCERS than that for one project… I’ve had a project reset after half a year’s work because some exec wanted to change the monetization scheme to free-to-play… They don’t care about design, or even players, only the bottom line. And the idea of making anything open or free is abhorrent to the typical business man. For that reason, and others, I’m much more into indie games these days.