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Why would Epic allow part of their core business to be threatened by malware and fraud?
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Which is exactly why they probably are not going to allow precompiled code. Even if you provide the source code to them but not your customers, if they miss embedded malware they could be somewhat liable. Why would they open that can of worms unnecessarily?
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Are you suggesting that if a multi-million dollar company such as Epic gives away their source for free as a ‘basic right’ then every single subscriber-developer must do the same?
With all due respect, that is Epic’s policy for Epic software. It is not *my *policy.
Keep in mind that the ‘basic right of free access’ isn’t actually free. It costs the subscriber $19pm and/or 5% commission of any profit made from sales related to the basic ‘right of free access’.
So, yes, unlike me, Epic can afford to give away their source for free because it will generate millions of dollars via other revenue streams.
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(Why is it that every post you’ve made in this thread has been edited, sometimes hours later?)
You are putting words in my mouth that clearly weren’t there. And you can see that from the fact that the post you quoted has not been edited.
I never said anything about giving sources for free. I don’t know why I’m even trying to have a discussion with you when you’re changing things to not look as bad after the fact and intentionally misrepresenting my position.
It comes down to this: None of the DRM schemes listed in this thread can actually stop pirates. The only people they will hurt are the people like me that follow the rules and want to pay people for content that’s working now.
Let’s take blueprint functions being locked down, how do you propose that works?
a.) The editor checks to see if a function should be hidden, and if so, won’t allow users to open the function’s definition. This is trivial to bypass, especially since people pay for Unreal Engine because it includes the source. Just figure out the one boolean check and feed it the right value.
b.) The specific function is pre-compiled. That’s great, but I’d wager the compilation process for blueprints is pretty easy to reverse. The only piece of information I’m basing that on is the fact that you can deploy Blueprint-only games to iOS from Windows. Means they’re not being compiled as C++. Since it appears to all be based on reflection, there’s even a good chance that function and variable names are even in plaintext. Maybe I’m wrong on all this, I haven’t actually looked into it, but it seems like there’s a good starting point there.
c.) The blueprint is encrypted and only decrypted for compilation. Great, just means you grab the unencrypted sources at that point.
You fundamentally cannot give the user a locked box and a key to open that box, and still control how and when that box is opened. You can make the key harder to get to, but literally all that does is inconvenience the people that actually follow your rules. THE PEOPLE THAT WOULD PIRATE WON’T BE AFFECTED. That’s why I’m so stubborn on this point, it’s not that I want your stuff to be pirated, it’s because unless you have a fundamentally different approach, it’s not going to work. And if you have an approach that actually would work without inconveniencing legitimate users, you don’t need to sell content on the marketplace, you can just make billions selling it to every software house on the market.
Stop focusing on treating the people that might give you money as suspected thieves. It’s not going to do a **** thing about the actual thieves.
Hi ,
Please remember to keep the conversation civil and professional. We encourage open and honest debate, however it needs to be kept to a respectful level. Thank you!
why is this an argument . The fact is there is no way to stop piracy. Period. The best you can do is take a look from time to time to see if any of your stuff has been used in a commercial product or is listed on any torrent sites and hope the answer is a no. If you cant get around the fact that someone out there is inclined to grab your stuff and share the love then the digital arts may not be for you. it is not Epics responsibility to track down pirates and I would rather they keep working to improve the engine anyway.This was a debate between my two man team. If we are going to put content out there due to piracy concerns. and if 30% is to steep after a little debate we decide the pros are heavier than the cons for a few reasons.
1 it is a possible revenue stream to assist in continued development.
2 self marketing. If we are creating content the community is purchasing then our name will be out there
3 though 30% is a little on the high side we don’t need to worry about hosting or excepting payments etc.
and our decision would be to stop creating community content if we do in-fact see our stuff being spread out there. So its up to each developer to weigh the pros and the non changeable cons to see if it works for them and where they want to go.
Good luck to all the developers out there and stay tuned for our future content releases we have a few packs planned thus far.
I am for a DRM-free market.
Something that I just noticed, is that no one mentioned how the hell do you want to implement anti-piracy? If the content is locked, that somehow it needs to be opened within the engine, which is open source. So even with an implementation you could easily rip any anti-piracy measurements apart (if my way of thinking is actually correct) and if you don’t know how to, then I bet there are going to be enough tutorials on “dark” sites which tell you how to.
The games industry showed often enough what happens if you enforce DRM too hard: the only people who are going to suffer are your customers, not the “pirates”. The only game I know, with no piracy, is SimCity 5, but only because it runs on EA’s servers and we all know what happiness all players had when nothing worked like it should. Hurray! (sarcsm)
Something that already was mentioned before: I want to be able to modify the assets I buy. I might incorporate tweaks or integrate parts of assets into other assets to create something else.
Your vision is not mine, and forcing your’s upon me is going to scare me off.
I can’t stand it if someone claims to have done work, which was really done by someone else who haven’t got any credit now, but if the license says that you can do that than what do you want to do?
It’s not reasonable from a moral PoV to do such thing, but there are enough people who are honest and pay for other’s work and credit them properly. I am one of those, but I see no reason to support someone who is going to treat me like dirt, only because a small percentage of people is not as honest as the rest.
Lets be honest here, there’s really no way around this in reality. If something exists, it’ll likely be spread around the internet and downloaded illegally. That’s the way it works these-days, sadly. The best you can hope for, is that by accessing the engine and other such content for free, they’ll eventually become subscribers. In the end, if they wish to publish something, they’ll have to pay royalties, anyway.
Of course, that’s referring to content released by Epic. Now, when it comes to third-party vendors / creators releasing their content on the marketplace? That’s a little more tricky. I think the best way to combat piracy on that front, is by offering the content at a competitive rate. Then, hopefully the majority of people would purchase it, rather than pirate it. Similarly, by providing support and releasing updates when possible (for no additional charge) would likely also help.
I really couldn’t imagine some kind of package (such as Unity’s .uasset files) really making any difference, however.
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The only (weak) option at the moment is obfuscation and letting your blueprint/material graphs look like spaghetti madness from hell.
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By the way, people…this is quite honestly a terrible idea. Please, don’t do this. Is it a deterrent to pirates? Maybe. However, for those who’re purchasing the content legally from the marketplace for the purpose of learning various workflows and the like, this isn’t ideal, at all. If I’m buying content, I want to be able to understand it. Otherwise, it’s worthless to me.
Fact: any kind of protection will make it cumbersome for legit users and just a small nuisance for pirates.
So I just hope they’ll leave it as it is.
Couldn’t Epic simply connect the purchased assets to players accounts. Have a random serialized tag on the buyers account and product package to be loaded into the engine before it allows them finalize their game. For example if someone has a special marketplace encrypted asset they would need to validate the serial to their account that would also contain its generated serial. This could work for teams if they are under a special group connection handled by Unreal to see who is using whose serial. I’m no security specialists but its just an idea.
But I have a simple suggestion. Definitely not foolproof, but good enough I believe.
How about:
Use a simple close-sourced Plugin to handle usage of purchased asset.
The public-build editor cannot read purchased asset but would need plugin to ‘read’ them. In this way , only epic could make these special encrypted marketplace asset and provide the
plugin already compiled.
This could be done discreetly without significant hassle to legit user.
Just my 2 cents on this issue. My assets are being pirated , but i’m not really making a big hassle of it, it’s just that I am seeing some people are really taking their marketplace sales as serious
business activity and I would love to see that continuing in benefit of the Unreal community. If the sales go , these people go.