Hi
I was interested in how people are securing their game?
ie - when you sell a copy you dont allow the game to be copied and played by someone else.
Thanks
S
Don’t sell it.
100% effective.
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Drm .
Should you really be that toxic?
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No matter what you do, your game will be pirated. No protection can prevent that. The only thing you’ll lose by protecting your game against piracy are potential customers.
Best thing to do is to accept piracy and sell your game at a reasonable price.
I recommend setting up at least a basic drm solution. If your game is nothing big, no hacker will spend his time on your project, and you will be secured from pretty much every threat.
Sorry but you are being a maximalist here. Why lock a door with key if it can be broken?
No matter the protection, basic or advanced, crackers will do their job. It’s a jungle out there. Everybody wants to be the first. Also, basic protection provides not only a perfect training ground but also easy points for veteran crackers.
Make it depend on running on a server?
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Do you have a game already?
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That’s pretty much the only way to handle it. Basically, do what Blizzard did with Diablo 3 where all of the enemy AI code is handled by the protected server. It won’t stop people from making private servers where they write their own code for the AI, but the popularity dictates how probable that is. WoW is another example and you see Blizzard playing whackamole with private servers all the time.
Other than that, there is absolutely nothing you can do to protect your game. Almost all DRM can be defeated within hours tops. Anything encrypted can be decrypted super fast with virtual machining, so it’s futile to try to combat it beyond a basic level of protection. Price your game reasonably and find ways to spread the word of your game. If 50% of of people are going to pirate your game, it’s better that it’s 50% of 500k people, rather than 50% of 5k people.
That makes no sense at all but I guess what you are trying to say is that if the price is very low a lot of those who would have pirated the game would now choose to buy since it is actually easier than pirating.
This is why DRM is such a bad idea because it not only doesn’t work against pirates it makes life difficult for legitimate customers who then get angry that they have more issues than the pirates do.
Agreed about DRM, this is reason i did not buy latest Farcry, Denuvo is annoying, on top of that yet another all the time running in background UPlay.
And about Indie and pirating. As indie dev you should be happy that they pirate your game, it means you did something worth pirating. This means your game is better than 99% of indie games on steam.
All all those pirates get to know your game, so maybe they buy next one.
What I’m trying to say is that pirating is more of a % thing, like a per capita rate. I know a lot of people are going to try to be naive naysayers about this, but 50% is probably a pretty accurate number. Why do most people pirate? Cost vs value. People will be a lot more likely to buy your 5h campaign single player game if it costs 10USD vs 60USD. Especially if it’s a new IP…
Not every cracker will spend time on cracking the game. You are basically just giving out your game to copy by every kid without any effort. Effort stops people.
You don’t need every cracker. All you need is one. In case you don’t know, as soon a game or program is cracked, the info and/or the crack is immediately disseminated.
You know what torrents are or file sharing sites?
Do you really think kids are the one cracking (some yes)? No, all they have to do is wait a couple of hours or a few days after the launch, to get the game. So … no effort from their part.
But if the game has a reasonable price then they will most likely buy the game and not risking in getting some malware.
Thanks for all the reply’s guys, I suppose that alot of security would be handled by Steam/Xbox and PS networks but any other sales would just open you up as you say
Fortunately I am looking to sell the game around the $5 mark anyway so as you say hopefully it doesnt matter
Thanks
Stephen
People are so toxic here. . Of course people cracking the games easily but when i sell my small game i don’t want friends to recommend each other and just copy it because that could mean houndreds of players who didn’t pay for the game just copy and pasted and when you just starting you don’t want to lose 100 dollars. .
Use any anti cheat software and add a product activation and it will verify it from a server if it was used before.
Best bet which is a mix of what some people have said.
Dont protect the game, people will pirate it and there is not much you can do if its not a multiplayer only game.
Release it unprotected, still require cs keys etc. Of course.
Do a major update and hold off certain features on first release and when this is done add anti cheat, server product activation etc. This can still be cracked but is much harder.
Repeat this process if your a good developer you will have allot to add even after the game is out of the door.
This will make crackers lifes harder, new updates become more of a pain and allot of people will be happy just downloading an out of date game.
When they play the game and love it, see that the game is updated allot and again see features that they want to try out etc. They will probably buy it anyway so they are not waiting weeks or months at a time for someone to crack the latest version.
This wouldnt work for a AAA game as crackers are on the ball with those but for a good indie game its more than likely that your updates will slip through the cracks and 99% of cracks that the public are aware of become outdated.
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