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.
It boils down to the specific case. I don’t think there’s one right answer for all cases. That’s why it’s good to make a risk and effort assessment. For some games it might be helpful. For others it won’t make a difference.
The point I’m making is it doesn’t make sense for any Godot game. It’s wasted effort. There’s a Godot de-compiler that will literally just reconstruct your code sans comments. Encryption is just a speed bump to that process. Locks only keep honest people honest, and there are no honest people trying to steal your game.
Btw, dev can code in C++/Rust/Swift through gdextension to make it difficult for people to decompile your code, but that would make your life harder too if you never code in any of those language + compilation time
There’s also GDMaim which obfuscates all GDScripts when exporting a project, resulting in increased difficulty of successful reverse engineering for those who insterested.
It really doesn’t. Any self respecting cracker will be delayed by about 30 seconds, as they have access to the same tools and can just reverse the algorithms used in obfuscating tools.
Red herring and actual bad advice.
You’re also assuming that this is a one-on-one thing. If someone is stealing your game to create a knock-off to steal your game, it’s going to be a company from China or India who can afford to throw lots of people at the problem, and that’s what those teams do for a living.
And if it’s people pirating your game, only one person has to crack it, and there’s more than one hacker out there who thinks they’re fighting capitalism by releasing free versions of games.
Ultimately there’s no perfect protection, all protection schemes can be broken given enough time and resources, and some very easily at that
Often the resources needed to build some form of protection just aren’t worth it unless you’re also spending a far greater amount on producing the game, and even then you have to balance the investment in resources and time to protect your content to how effective it will be
If we’re talking strictly protecting your game from being straight up ripped off, or your assets stolen, it’s rarely worth it. Depending on where the ripped off copy is published, or what they use the assets for, the proper way to deal with that is to report it or get legal about it
That is a reason why indie devs might need to depend more on asset protection, as unlike big game companies we can’t really afford to sue people. But it still is never going to be an effective countermeasure in cases where people actually put in effort, and the effort you put in is usually going to be more than that put in by an attacker, so it’s not really a feasible approach
And in the end I don’t think any of the fears that make people try to protect their games are really well founded, if we are just talking about people ripping off games they usually don’t even bother to crack it, they just republish it unchanged
Somehow consoles such Xbox is not easily cracked, essentially thing is OS allow crack software thanks to ability recompile, on series x , ps4,5 is rather not possible as far as I know
Is there emulator for PS5 or Series S, X ?
Just saying the PC versions make it crackable because of access to files .
Future will be at some point cloud play, where only video stream goes from centre and you not even have installed game, this way there is nothing to crack only maybe cd keys for purchase in store .
Is there a market for one? You can just pirate the game and install it on the hard drive of your PS5. You might need a hardware adjustment to do it, but it’s possible. That’s how old consoles were hacked.
You have the same access to files on modern consoles. The media used to be the security. Now it’s all digital download to your console. The locks keep honest people honest.
That’s been around for 20 years. Turns out, it never took off because people want to feel like they own their games, AND you cannot have ANY interruptions in gameplay due to latency. It’s a problem providers of streaming games cannot fix because they cannot control ISPs.
Yeah ,I get your point but if internal storage in retail is encrypted how do you get access to it ? Not sure about Sony but Xbox One ( first gen ) was just recently officially cracked and the next gen are more robust thanks to not many things load without internet connection .
If you put device even in dev mode it still you have separate part of drive and less resources then retail edition .
Just link for Xbox one crack doesn’t seem to be that easy to get files out from retail download
Cursory search for series X hacks and mods, at least one link in there about custom firmware which is how you unlock a console so you can copy games with it, access files, etc.
My first box, the original one, was modded to serve as a full-blown devkit at home. Getting access to software part of devkit was the easy part. A colleague at Gameloft did the chipping. I had space and a switch for 3 different firmwares : the original so I could play online with legit game copies and two custom ones, for different features.
Afaik, consoles are locked harder than back then but all end up hacked.
is rather not possible as far as I know