Piracy solutions can be made good too, though.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Well if someone is out there doing it for free, isn't it silly that some are demanding money and doing all kinds of extra work to lock things down?
You don't gotta pay me to dance, but I put on a better show than any trained ballerina.
Can they?
I'm an indie game developer (3 years at current company). Here's a brief summary of the anti-piracy/anti-cheat history we did -
- We noticed people were uploading old versions of our games on 3rd party app stores, so we introduced a feature that makes the game refuse to start if it's on too old of a version
- When we later updated the minimum SDKs, and older devices couldn't update, we had inadvertently remotely bricked a perfectly functional game on their device
- To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
- EVEN TODAY I spent multiple hours and an Uber to get my hands on a specific device that was having crash issues because whatever logs I could get remotely weren't nearly suffice to debug an issue
- People were cheating Unity's IAP store, so we installed a plugin that validated IAPs.
- IAPs took multiple more seconds to process, hurting legit buyers
- The cheating metrics went down, but because fewer people were buying IAPs, our rankings tanked on various ad networks
- Hackers were making modded clients, so we added obfuscation
- This made our builds much more harder to debug, and adds yet another step in our build pipeline
- Users were editing values in memory to give themselves more levels and beat the leaderboard
- We manually banned them from the leaderboard. It takes like 5 seconds and happens once a week, not a big deal
- Users were editing values in memory for more coins
- It doesn't affect us in any way, at this point we stopped caring
For any game with online components, the "ideal" way to combat piracy or cheating is with leaving as much stuff on the server side as possible, not unlike an MMO. Anything left to client side validation will be hacked.
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Given enough resources anything can be done. I didn't say it was gonna be easy. But I gotta say, probably easier to make "cracked" movies convenient than games.
To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
Why didn't you just encrypt your logs, and make your company the only one to have the key to actually read it? Or is there a risk of someone reading the data in memory before it gets encrypted and written to disk?
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At the end it's all about convenience and how much you need to tinker with something, because your free time also matters and if the effort to pirate something is higher than the price of that something then you are more likely to choose convenience. Same with Netflix.
I only run legit games on my handheld Linux computer. You're right, a user like me could most certainly install games some other way but there's no point putting in all this effort since I can just joink it from my years old steam account and be very happy in the process.