Hi all,
What is your favourite Unity game licensing system? I mean, how do you sell the games that you have developed in Unity while making sure they are not, um…, freely redistributed? Thanks.
-t
I don’t use a licensing system unless one is forced upon me by a particular publisher or distributor. Even then, I try to get it removed if I have enough leverage to do so. It’s my contention that my time is better spent making the game more polished and more enjoyable - so that legitimate customers are more likely to buy it than it is spend trying to prevent people pirating it. It’s also my contention that a business model which relies upon getting people who pirate whatever they possibly can to buy your game is a broken business model.
(This is in the wrong forum, by the way)
Thank you for your answer and sorry for posting in the wrong forum, I should have double checked first.
I’m still a bit confused with anti piracy measures on software. Don’t understand why people put it on, as it’s never actually worked, ever.
Except on MMOs where pirates are forced to use pirate servers and not the ones normal users play on.
Free to play games also tend not to be pirated seeing as they’re free anyway which is why that model is popular in non-western regions due to piracy.
Free to play only recently caught on with main stream western games.
If you make good content, people willing to pay for such content will pay.
People who aren’t willing to pay never will no matter how much you try to lock it down - if you ever do manage to make a 100% priate proof program people who weren’t willing to pay will simply go and pirate something else instead and you still won’t make any more money for all of that anti-piracy effort. Thus, IMO anti-piracy really doesn’t help anyone. It makes your costs higher and forces your legit customers to jump through needless hoops.
Better to just not bother with it IMO.
Edit: Double Post.
Nice theory… got any data to back it up?
So why would a perfectly intelligent company like valve, or EA or Ubisoft… you know a company with billions of dollars… still choose to include anti piracy measures.
Think this through. They have billions and some of the brightest minds in the industry, and just put antipiracy on everything and bloat it with DRM. Why?
Becase some folk are simple and although they may know how to copy all the files from the game they dont know how to download the requires cracks and stuff to make it work… so although its still going to be pirated they still put the anti piracy on there as it will drop the amount of piracy.
If your car gets stolen, and you left the keys in it, your out of luck. With copyright, its very hard to take legal action to protect your work if you say, “well anyone could get this if they want it…”. Legally, if they want to protect their work, investing those billions of dollars into the artists, programmers, engineers, etc, they need to have some level of protection encryption etc.
Its understandable that as a person, persons, or company, you want to have some level of protection for your investment. But, as has been stated above, it fails more than it works, and I know I’ve purchased some games that protection has broken it, and I was unable to play for months due to problems with faulty software freaking about other software and really, as a customer, I shouldn’t have to put up with any hassle for something I paid for.
I don’t think the OP is really talking about anti-piracy DRM at all (although any form of digital distribution that involves transacting money for access to software could be considered anti-piracy DRM), I think he just wants a solution to sell his game besides putting the download up for free on his website with a “pay if you want to” button.
I agree that the ridiculous draconian DRM that the likes of ubisoft implement are obnoxious, unnecessary and don’t really reduce piracy at all, but I do think there is some low-hanging fruit piracy deterrence to any implementation of “DRM”, like a simple one-time serial key system.
In my younger days I personally pirated games and gave up after not being able to find a valid, consumed serial key, after hours key searching and keygen rigamaroo, so there’s that. At least ONE person was deterred 
When I say anti-piracy measures, I’m talking about overt systems what require activation ect.
In that sense I don’t see Valve as using any anti-piracy “measures”. They restrict games to accounts for obvious business reasons, encrypt downlands for pre-loads to protect release dates and use custom executables that only require steam but for all intents and purposes are transparent to the end user.
Gabe Newell (Founder, President of Valve) has even said himself that anti-piracy measures are pointless, here’s a direct quote:
In other words, the major issues with piracy are mostly from countries like China or Russia where piracy grew so rampant initially because popular western releases took months to be translated and released in those areas. In a weird way the pirates were providing a better service because they were translating and distributing a localized copy of the game way before the official studio got around to doing it.
Also, http://www.gog.com/ no DRM at all.
Seems pretty clear DRM is not something paying customers want (I know I don’t). People who don’t even bother looking at the official store and go straight to pirate bay ect weren’t ever going to pay you to begin with, to delude yourself otherwise is foolish IMO. Lets face it, the majority of people here aren’t making $100 a pop games (consoles games cost $100 USD or more in Australia), you’re mostly making $1-$5 mobile apps or $10-$15 indy steam games. If you were making AAA console titles then sure, some light anti-piracy system to make direct copying difficult is fine, beyond that though you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.
Looking on demonoid right now I see that the top pirated games are… two different Angry Birds titles. So thousands of people go to sites like that to save $1-$2 ???. Ridiculous, they’re doing it because they never intended to buy it, ever, but it’s there and they’ve heard people taking about the game so they’ll grab it. I don’t have any “data” to back that up, but the only logical alternative is that this customer was previous looking at your game on an app store thinking something like “Man, $5 is murder, I won’t be able to eat without that $5 so I’m going to pirate bay!”.
Which scenario seems more likely to you?
Having a lot of gamer friends I know a heap of people who pirate games. I’ve asked quite a lot of them about this and none of them, not one, has ever failed to find a pirated copy and then decided to pay for that game instead - if they have filed to find a pirated copy their response was always something like “Nah, I’ll just wait till someone cracks it”. That’s not a lost sale - you never had that sale to begin with.
So, In a fantasy world were anti-piracy is a good solution and actually works 100% of the time then the following would have to happen to actually generate a sale from anti piracy:
Customer sees game on store - decides they like it but do not want to pay that much for it. (Not a lost sale, you haven’t convinced them to purchase yet.)
Customer spends an hour or so searching piracy websites looking for a free version of your game.
Custom can’t find your game, decides they can live without it - they’ll probably pirate your competitors game instead which is a knock-off/clone of your awesome game.
or
Customer can’t find your game but still really really wants it enough to part with their cash, decides to go back to your store and pay full price. (sale actually generated due to anti piracy).
It’s pretty much impossible to capture that kind of data, but I’ll eat my shorts if customers like that make up more than 1% of your total sales for a real game released in today’s market. And to do this you’re potentially annoying the other 99% of your customers through some of “we think you’re a criminal until you prove yourself otherwise” activation process.
It just doesn’t seem to be a worth it.
Restricting the use of a game to a specific online steam account “for obvious business purposes” is DRM in it’s purest form. It is, by definition, “access control technology with the intent to limit the use of digital content after sale”.
It is an example of good DRM in that it’s but unintrusive, transparent and for the most part user-friendly, but you can’t go picking and choosing what you call DRM.
DRM isn’t bad. Bad DRM is bad.
Because according to this most excellent, thorough, and balanced article on piracy and DRM, DRM actually works:
So DRM would make sense for big publishers who expect to move hundreds of thousands of copies of their game during the first few days of release. But for indie developers? Probably not so much.
QFA!
DRM only needs to do one thing to work reasonably and thats keeping out script kiddos.
A real cracker will always crack it, it does not matter how complex it is or how much it destroys the experience of valid, stupid, paying customers (Ubisoft Customers in general with their perma online drm for solo games). DRM should always prevent pirates from doing something, never paying customers, otherwise its not DRM but reputation suicide
As for the original question itself: There is no unity focused licensing system. Unsure how well the standard ones work with unity that are also applied by big platforms like BigFishGames but I would generally go along those lines too as those techs allow you to create trials that are time limited not content limited, which is much more addictive to users than content limited trials and fake trials with custom content and alike. And it takes so much less time to create
On the surface, those with TPB (the pirate bay), gazillion of others pirate forums are only the ‘sneak’ peak preview what’s is coming originally from the REAL scene, there was not really much so-called pirate forum’ only couple are known like AP, anyway the thing about software or game protection is to prevent the kiddies attempt on messing up with you, while in the end there is more persistent attempt on cracking your software then it’s the time that your products is really exist, in other word i think the time frame when we grand launch the products is the critical mass point for gaining the momentum, as on for getting the ROI, and there is various ways to do it, the process of game development already time consuming and cumbersome enough why you should coding your own solution, as for third party recommendation i have the following list based on my own research :
- Themida
- VMProtect
- Enigma Protector
And don’t forget as in game is more into realtime interaction, protecting with ‘maximum’ kiddies proof protection will sacrificing your game’s performance, so protect wisely.
There is no holy grail in protection, as in human made are always flawed, even tough with the protected you might get cracked by the p2p group, at-least you could re-protect it the next version of your release, imho most of the ‘surface’ cracker won’t cracking your software for every version of your minor release, normally it’s once every 2-4 months, depends on request on their forums or their own liking.
If you don’t care much about ROI and your IP/Sensitive code then there is no use on protection.
For me protecting my own products is because the .net mono implementation itself as it’s doesn’t really compiled to native code, with a few steps your could get the compiled ‘pseudo’ code, with some more attempts you could really get it compiled, i don’t want my man’s hours being wasted when i am seeing my algorithm in my competitor games.
Other practice is as for example in android development, to code your ‘sensitive’/IP function in native code (c/c++ in android ndk) than in java as the unity plugins. Again this is not also bulletproof there is already ida pro hex rays plugin who will be able to ‘decompile’ compiled native code into pseudo c code, so nothing is absolute 100% protection.
I also agree to working hard on providing consistent content and unique updates to your game also might prevent those cracking attempt, and in addition realistic pricing, for me you need to found what kind of ‘protection’ that really works for yourself not depends on my opinions,others,articles as there is always be a unique case to be found :).
Note: I apologize if my ‘advertisement’ in my signature really caught your eyes, it’s doesn’t really have any benefits for me, that’s just my friend’s products, i am just helping him.
Because big perfectly intelligent companies have shareholders (or paymasters in a more general sense) and when you have shareholders, you have to humour them. So when the media are shouting about piracy and shareholders swallow every word, the companies have to pander to those insecurities. You’re a freelancer, right? You must have clients ask you to do things which you know perfectly well are a complete waste of your time and their money. Yet you (I assume) smile politely and do as they ask. It’s how business works.
Just like shoplifting, it’s nearly impossible to stop piracy. More expensive (and invasive) measures increase your success rate, but may actually cost you more money than you save. They may also cost you legit customers because of the inconvenience.
The software industry hasn’t really understood this yet. They’re convinced that they can do anything they want to your computer because their money is at stake, and gamers will roll over and take it. Some will, actually… But then, some shoppers would allow pat-downs exiting the store to control theft.
They haven’t yet wised up to the reality that their anti-piracy measures are costing them more than they are saving. Oh sure, some companies have… But it’s mostly the smaller ones. One of the reasons for this is that it’s almost impossible to tell how many pirates bought the game instead of pirating, thanks to their countermeasures. It’s somewhere between 0 and their total sales numbers, but no idea how many.
On Topic: Didn’t Eric make a nice lightweight licensing system?
EDIT: Yes, yes he did. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/13799-Automated-Registration-System-available