Marketplace needs a way to preview/demo content

[apoisonedgift]

@Wolven_Digital;577227

I think most would agree that having a demo of the content we sell is a great thing. Nobody is against that, as far as I read here.

There has been one or two sellers in here saying that they think playable demos in EVERY INSTANCE hurt sales… but that’s honestly ******** A bad playable demo - sure that hurts - but that’s on the seller.

@Wolven_Digital;577227

The issue is that this makes our content much more susceptible to piracy. While it’s incredibly easy to just buy a content pack and upload it on whatever hub, you still have to buy it first. This is a big deterrent for many hackers and data miners. Plus, you have to find enough seeds to download it, if you’re not the host. However, if our preview is available to everyone, we may see a rise of softwares that allow independants to directly rip the content out of preview builds. This will inevitably lead to a surge in piracy.

What we ask is that if there is an implementation of a preview system - which I’m perfectly fine with - that it’d be secure for us and our assets. A compiled build is not secure for that - or at least not in its state.

@Achilleon;577197

Huge security risk. Just because the game is packaged, does not mean it’s safe. Everything can be reverse engineered, packaging just makes it harder, but not impossible. One example is the latest Mortal Combat that is done in Unreal 3 as it’s characters are taken off from the game itself and going around the internet.

Second example is Street Fighter 5 which is created by Unreal 4 engine. Not only people can get the models out of the packages but they can also add them back in after the editing they do on them. That’s quite the feat.

So yeah, it’s not secured at all. Your best option is asking before buying.

The majority of conversation in here is about implementing a playable preview of code and blueprint assets, which cannot be reverse engineered in the means you mention, because the code is compiled. You would just get a pile of compiled code that, I guess you could probably do something with, but it’s not going to be friendly and usable at all. So that standpoint doesn’t really hold up IMO.

Outside of the majority of this conversation - if we were to consider it for art assets, then yes that becomes a risk, but the risk is pretty low to be honest. As mentioned a million times already - a pirate is almost never a potential customer, and anyone wanting to use your content in a commercial product is asking for trouble if they pirate anyway.

Plus… I think that if so many sellers are going to assume that there are so many customers out to hurt them via piracy, then I think it’s only fair that customers treat sellers the same way and assume that there are a number of them out to screw them over with inadequate content and request playable builds haha.

For the record - I have a playable build of one of my assets available since it launched, and after all the talk in this thread, I will be making sure to upload playable builds of the other two when I am able (sometime in the next month I’d say). I’m pretty surprised by the overall attitude from both sides in this equation but I think it’s a good move for everyone so I’ll put my money where my mouth is haha.