The topic of pirates uploading your game or assets to a torrent site and getting away with it has been discussed a million times. Yet the market is flooded with new assets and games daily. Which makes me wonder, how do you run a TV store if thieves can walk in and grab the TVs for free?
Here on the forums we read horror stories about developers suddenly not making any money because their assets are on a torrent site in another country. On Reddit actual percentages are posted of piracy in games and there is so little pressure on software thieves that the pirates actually reply there and admit they steal your data. There seems to be a global mindset there that games should be âfor fun, not moneyâ, or that âthe devs donât need the moneyâ. Anyone stealing for whatever reason should be logged and treated as a thief, but this is simply not done.
I have made a large scale mod for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series called Road To The North, this was made for fun with no business in mind:
As a game developer who wants to turn his skillset and love for games into a fulltime job, I need to deal with people whoâd rather have me starve and play my game for free than pay for it. As part of the research I have done, this turned out to be a fact for both âsmallâ game devs and the top large companies.
With that in mind, to start as a full-time âsmallâ game dev seems unrealistic unless you can make people want to pay for your game. When presented the option of the pirate (free, low service, high risk, outdated files), you must provide the player with plenty of reasons to pay (high service, no risk, additional content, auto updated files.).
I would love to hear from game developers who are currently brainstorming about their sales model or have been through the entire process. Letâs start a discussion here focusing on how to make the sales model great for both the developer and the players.
My thoughts so far:
Push updates with new content often. Let the player receive the updates automatically through so that pirated builds are always outdated.
Ensure giving a fine experience on the marketplace (provide demoâs / refund policy etc.)
Additional improved experience for paid players, such as customer support and community access.
Sales model 1: Sell the game in parts, players pay for what they wish to play and not more (think of Life Is Strange).
Sales model 2: Players pay a reasonable amount monthly to receive extra online content and future updates / content. The extra content will be in the cloud thus canât be pirated.
As a dev with a pirated game, I can tell you it is basically impossible. Itâs like pirating music, people seem to think itâs their ârightâ, or some other fkd up idea.
You could use the Epic model. Let people have the game for free, and pay for content. It seems to work for them.
I often wonder about using a validating server, to allow the game to play. The protocol for this changes on a regular basis. Pirated versions wonât be able to connect, because they are out of date. Downside is you need a connection to play. But this would definitely work.
This is definitely an option. The challenge would still be to actually make people do in-game purchases but I think this is especially great for online games, since you can already get a large player base on the free game and can possibly validate the additional content against pirated content. Iâm a fan of âpay for what you playâ, (if you go to one ride in the amusement park you donât pay for the entire park up front.)
If the game is offline and all the game data is client side you could hack it to skip the validation call. On the other side, if the game is online and must retrieve data from the server, the only thing they could do is reverse engineer the server data to make a pirate server. It would take more effort. World of Warcraft is a fine example here. You canât reverse engineer everything just based on data the server returns, you can have plenty of âhiddenâ software running server side only. The downside being that this server(s) costs money to maintain and when the game does not provide this money you must shut it down.
If you find a way to change it, youâll be famous
Iâd say 90% of people I saw streaming my game had pirated versions. I can tell because they didnât have certain updates.
Then they complain about some aspect, and Iâm sitting there shouting at the screen âITâS BECAUSE YOU DONâT HAVE THE REAL VERSIONâ
Idiots. I really hope there is such a thing as karma. Because if there is, these guys are going to reincarnate as little pieces of snot. No wait - thatâs what they are already. WowâŚ
Do we, though? Would the people that pirate the assets actually pay for assets if piracy wasnât an option?
In general, youâre going to get the best results by building a game that players love, and that gets good press all over the internet, and that is easy to purchase for not too much money. Most players donât actually do a lot of pirating, because there is malware and such among all the piracy downloads. If I can go to Steam or Epic and plunk down $10 and have the game on my machines right away, thatâs what Iâll do.
Additionally, if you can make your client free, and pay for a service account required to play, instead, then that will obviously let you control access much more. (As long as the online part is actually required, and not just a simple check you can patch out as a pirate.) That may also let you charge monthly fees, which might make more money than a single purchase. ($4/month or $40/year is generally going to give you more money than $20 for a one-time purchase, somewhat depending on game specifics.)
If youâre still super paranoid about your assets, you can always set up pixel streaming servers. Players just use their access device and gamepad, and all of the game and assets run on servers you host in the cloud. The draw-back is that this costs a lot of hosting costs, and thus youâll need to charge more for the game, which means youâll likely get fewer paying players.
If you canât pay for a TV, do you rob a store for one? Also itâs a mindset, if you let one person rob you a second one will. If you canât pay, donât play. You should have other priorities at that point.
I agree and this is also much more accessible than a one time payment of for example 60 euros. Especially if like you said the service is online and is required to play this seems like a valid option against piracy too.
Itâs funny I was just thinking about this today, basically players only need a potato PC with a good network connection right? Then all the gameâs files and calculations are done in a datacenter? I honestly believe that is the way where gaming should be going. Just rent out a gaming set in the cloud for X per hour with all your games on it. No pirates.
Paranoid is not quite the right word. Itâs a fact that the minute you launch the product itâs pirated and that means 0 income from the 20 or 90% who pirate.
I started paying for all my software (including shareware) many years ago, when I realized that programmers do, in fact, need to eat. (Not concidentally, when I myself started doing programming work for money âŚ)
But Iâm not saying what âought to beâ in the best of worlds. Iâm saying what is, in the current world. There are some things about the world we can change (mainly, what we, ourselves, choose to say and do,) and many things we canât change, and thus have to live with and work around.
A Chromebook will work fine, Iâm told! So, yes. But the infrastructure cost is quite noticeable. You may end up making more money with a cheaper subscription service and living with some amount of asset theft. (Besides, would whoever steals them really ship some game that anyone would care about? People looking for the easy way out tend to not create real value.)
Also: itâs generally the case that you do better if you make the experience really great for honest, paying, players, than if you spend that effort trying to deny the person who copies 2800 games and doesnât even start any of them. Those people wouldnât pay for your software if they couldnât pirate it, they simply wouldnât have any copy at all.
And if the anti-piracy work makes the experience for the honest players worse, then youâre losing out on real revenue there. Any publisher/game that needs administrator-level access to install kernel drivers for their anti-cheat, is simply âoutâ for me. I refuse to allow that.
Also, another good option is consoles. Then itâs the platform vendorâs job to prevent cheating, you just build a game!
Asset piracy is something Iâm very concerned with considering that Iâve worked on my game framework for almost 3 years now, scrapping and restarting over and over again, and now that Iâm finally almost ready to release this such an issue is coming to my mind.
Asset wise I donât think much can be done. But if you somehow have the money to pay for it, Iâm sure youâd be able to use a DRM for your finished game assuming you can pay for it. (Problem is, most of us indie developers probably donât have that kind of money.)
Last I checked a DRM in a packaged game wasnât ever against Unrealâs terms of service. I donât know who in their right mind would do that anyway⌠but I will add that for finished games. Again, assets, well, weâre probably all out of luck.
On that note, I donât even like DRMs. But I really donât know what else I could do. Weâre a tiny studio and we literally cannot even begin to afford the losses from piracy⌠hopefully once we grow enough we wouldnât need them anymore.
These are the people who do have huge lists of torrent downloads and keep seeding them on the network simply because they donât remove them from the list. If authorities actually did anything about it, or if it were legal to hunt those IPs then they would be in a lot of trouble anyhow. Youâd simply track the downloader without having to do effort on the game level luckily.
I completely agree. Client side anti-cheat does not make sense anyway. Let the client cheat / mod / whatever they do and let the server have a proper validation process. Even if you catch a âcheatâ client side, the server would still be foolish to trust the client.
Now this would be interesting, Is this some agreement with certain markets, parties or written in law? If only this were the case with Steam. I do think consoles make it a lot harder to pirate games made for them but I donât think the effect is as great as it used to be before 2005 when basically everyone had a potato PC. Still, even people with a PS2 quickly figured out that you could bypass the disc security entirely simply by opening the disk tray without using the button and swapping to a pirate copy. It was poorly thought out. I believe that when emulators also started to get popular that some consoles, at least PS3 became more complex to both reverse engineer and hack through hardware. Now in 2023 most of us have âNASAâ PCs to run any console on through which even the console exclusives reach PC in record time.
**Edit * For some reason I read âcheatingâ as pirating, Iâm a bit tired atm. Cheating itself isnât something you always want to prevent. You can get false detections or a desired mod could be blocked as cheating. Further if you donât code server validation and security any cheat could cause serious trouble on the server or even for other players and there is nothing a vendor can do about that. Client side there is no point defending against cheats.
We are in the same situation. All I want to do is release the framework modules to help out devs, then release the game(s) created with it as well.
If a security measure can be cracked / removed / bypassed or replaced by pirate code, it will be done by pirates. Making it effectively useless sadly and more of a pain in the a for players who did pay.
Funnily the laws often protect these people. I like comparing the software theft situation to the TV store. What do you do in a TV store? You log the people who steal on camera, shame them in public, claim for damages, worst case they get shot. Obviously this depends on the location and laws. Speaking of law, the thief could be off a lot worse. Now we look at software theft. Is it illegal ? yes. Is hacking the software illegal? yes. Is something done about it by authorities? No. May you do something about it? Well, acting on it is for about 90% illegal. You canât just pull up the IP of who downloaded a torrent and âactâ. What are you going to do legally? About everything you might think of requires the authorities to act or is illegal to do so yourself. Absolutely no one is going to track down some rando hiding behind 10 IP addresses in another country for a game developer if itâs high risk / illegal or not worth the money. Even if you knew who exactly stole from you itâs already in 2000 places on the internet so at that point itâs simply too late. Unless you want to spend full-time sending damage claims I guess.
What about EPIC? Thereâs an address you can report theft to, but from what Iâve read nothing is actually done? I mean what kind of task force would that be?
Google Stadia failed miserably, remote gaming is not an option for many games (fps where you need low latency) and even with a good connection they lag a lot, also Pixel streaming is not even close to the feeling that a physical machine gives.
Minecraft built an empire on piracy, I was the only âidiot with a licenseâ who bought it in alpha for 10$ while all my friends were using pirate clients and custom servers (because they couldnât join regular ones without license verification).
This is one of the reasons of Minecraftâs popularity increase, many children on YouTube were streaming a pirate version (and telling others how to download it for free), but this made it spread incredibly.
The second reason is that itâs a great game and thatâs why all of my friends bought the license later, when the price reached 20$ (so they actually gave more money to the publishers than me), if you see piracy as a âtry before you buyâ it could make a difference.
The same applies to marketplace assets: sometimes the code is just terrible (blueprint spaghetti monster, c++ nightmares, badly implemented third party libraries) or the models and animations are not even close to the word âoptimizedâ (many âfree for the monthâ assets are really embarrassing, Iâm really happy I didnât pay for them , honestly I wonder how they select them and decide to pay 7500$ for that s**t).
Sorry for the rant, what I was trying to say is that itâs pretty hard to get a refund on the marketplace, (my first mistake was buying a procedural dungeon and I still regret it after two years ) and if I can find a demo (or pirate) version before I buy them I always give it a try, sometimes the âreal thiefâ is the seller (especially on the Unreal marketplace), some products are tremendously overpriced and it takes more time to adapt them to your needs than writing the code from scratchâŚ
Itâs a hard topic to discuss, as a seller I understand your concern, I always try to sell my products at a honest price and offer a nice customer support, maybe Iâm not going to be rich but Iâm happy when someone thanks me for helping him.
That is disappointing. I remember that I tried a service similar to teamviewer years ago and only one would somewhat work well on Unreal Engine and games in general but it was no option on WIFI and no option on 2K, too slow. Makes me wonder how much further the network must be improved to get to the point where this is realistic.
This is an interesting theory, I thought Minecraftâs huge amount of updates were the reason for people to stick and pirates to lag behind but if piracy is the actual reason for its success Iâm leaving this planet .
More like always. There is no quality control. I made the mistake of paying 80 for a repository related plugin which was free and public on Github, apparently 90% made by someone else. That hurt a bit. Any poorly made software offends me lol. You only need a single perfect module per task, not 400 student projects. I donât want to discourage students here but there is a clear difference between code you write after 1 year and after 10 years and there is absolutely 0 quality control on the marketplace so digging through mini plugins sold for 40 euros or add a 0 is just a pain. I think this is a disappointment many of us feel when we do visit the market, look for existing software because we donât want to reinvent the weel, then instead return empty handed. Maybe it even motivates piracy for people with the âtry first buy laterâ mindset. With source code you just canât really provide a demo of the actual source like you can show gameplay on a video. Just like there are minimum requirements for assets such as meshes and textures there should be (a lot stricter) requirements for a marketplace asset containing code. A senior dev at EPIC could see in about 10 seconds if any of the c++ files is a total spaghetti or not. If one is the others will be. The star rating system we have there is not a reliable indicator of quality, but the only we have. Thatâs a whole new topic of discussion thoughâŚ
Randomly? I have no idea. I grab the âfreeâ assets but I doubt I will ever use them. I think the creators get paid though by EPIC. I am simply not going to clean up every asset pack and check every single file if itâs stolen or not. What about the sound packs? Which creator went outside to record a bear growling? How do I know itâs not copied from say Tomb Raider 3? Iâm not going to risk it.
By Publisher Cafofo Music, free content at least in januari.
This is what you get, apoligies, when your game is on Steam and some butt added content on the marketplace which puts your business at risk.
Waiting for the next mail of the other sound pack âFarm Animal Soundsâ (same publisher) if it gets detected. Or any other sound pack containing animal sounds.
I have contacted Epic and I sent a link to this post hoping to get an answer how we can deal with the marketplace piracy. Us honest developers are at risk of publishing pirated content through games.
Thanks Chiefwhosm for pointing out that the mail from Epic does not name the creator of the removed content, which creates confusion about products with a very similar name. Also, that the above content was removed from the Vault.
, honestly I wonder how they select them and decide to pay 7500$ for that s**t).
) and if I can find a demo (or pirate) version before I buy them I always give it a try, sometimes the âreal thiefâ is the seller (especially on the Unreal marketplace), some products are tremendously overpriced and it takes more time to adapt them to your needs than writing the code from scratchâŚ
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