In another thread I saw someone tell another that they “dont know what they are talking about” when they spoke of the simple FACT that nothing can be fully protected. This brought me to make this thread, to fully educate others on this simple, simple, simple fact.
Nothing is hack proof.
Have a 3D model in your game? It can be extracted.
Have 2D art? Extracted.
Copy Protection to avoid Piracy? Broken before release.
I once had a friend who argued with me that “nothing is impossible”. I support this mentality, but I am also realistic (and a devil’s advocate) as I told him “It is impossible to make something impossible!”
One day, he got extremely upset, claiming it is entirely possible to make something protected enough where it couldn’t be hacked. When I asked him if this was done and is possible, would it be possible to eventually make something to break it? The answer was no, and an angry scowl.
The idea is correct though: Nothing is impossible. It is always possible to crack protection-- whether or not that is an CIA database or the latest copy of Call of Duty. Even key-protected multiplayer games can be cracked-- that’s just not as common (or worth it, given the possible lawsuit) as a singleplayer crack.
SECURITY is about making it more difficult than it is worth to crack something. It is NOT about making it impossible or crack-proof. This goes along the lines of “You don’t try to burglar-proof your home. You simply make it harder to get into yours than your neighbor.”
Agreed 200%. Ultimately the games and assets are data, which at some point needs to be unencrypted to be shown on a screen, go through speakers, or interpreted as logical gates. It -can- be hacked. Same for servers. And security is definitely about making it more trouble than it’s worth for most people, or at the very least making it impractical and not user-friendly. I like the example about homes, that’s very much the same thing.
As long as your Unity game isn’t a wide open door to everyone and their dog (which is what happens when unpacking it can be -automated- by using Reflector), you should be fine.
It isn’t worth protecting anything that gets output (models, sounds, etc). Just put a signature in your art and music that is unnoticeable to your users. If fans want to rip your models and make machima, let them. Fan sites and fan generated content should be encouraged. If they take advantage of your work and try to profit, hopefully you can support a law suit.
Blizzard has their files open to the public in MPQs and there are various model viewers. .PAK files and other compressed file types also have tools that can extract them.
Maybe some day we’ll have the technology to prevent this.
Well, the only thing I’m worried about is people stealing my 2D images and using it in their own games.
However, I guess that’s not really much of a problem.
I guess since it’ll be done in Unity3D, my biggest REAL concern is actually for someone to take a MMORPG made in Unity3D, and create pirate servers for their own use, early on in the game’s life.
The game will be Free2Play as well, so hopefully that’ll make people happy
The solution to that is to have a strong community and loyal fanbase. If your game is liked and relatively well known, people will bash the game that stole your assets.
Example: There was a MMORPG called Alganon that 100% ripped off of WoW (the healing talent tree was 95% the same as WoW’s priest tree). The game had a lot of backing during development. Then the beta came out. People saw the similarities, scoffed, and the game tanked. Hard.
I don’t think anyone is shameless enough to extract assets from a game and use it in their own game for profit. If they were, then everyone would be able to tell and either the social reaction to that would be so great that the game would not be played by anyone or the original copyright holder would probably notice it and send them a cease and desist. As for simply extracting models for fan videos or whatever, don’t really see a problem with this, and neither do major game publishers: Sometimes they outright encourage it like in the case of Bungie, for example.
I agree with windexglow. Any piece of software composed of binary data accessible by the cpu can be hacked completely. However, it’s possible to make it almost impossible or very hard, or at least difficult for the majority.
The major problem here is not even “it can be hacked”, you are all ignoring some pretty trivialities: Anything thats hardware accelerated has to be sent to the hardware in a hardware understandable form at some point, textures as image data, sound as sound data, meshes as vertex - index - uv - normal - tangent arrays, shaders as themself
at that point you can just read it from the pipeline with little to no effort, at least for the things above.
The only two things you can protect at all are code, which even when being “hackable” is a major pain if you have to reverse engineer it from platform compiles etc and protection with anti debugger etc solutions in make it even harder.
The other thing thats protectable is animations because they are not mesh data and alike just a massive sequence of position and rotation data that are applied in realtime.
but thats it.
don’t get fooled by beginners that claim that an encrypted model is save, cause they just really are that, beginners.
There is a reason why big game companies, at least the intelligent ones, not those with global domination on drug attitudes like Ubisoft, protect what makes sense (the game licensing) and not the assets, cause it would be lots of work, cost performance at runtime and that at 0 gain
There is no such thing as real data protection… everything can be extracted and copied somehow, and from what I’ve seen, it seems the more you try to protect your program, the more effort others will bend into hacking that protection away…
Personally, I’d find it flattering if people managed to extract content off my game to make something with it… it means they like it. It’d be far worse if no one ever tried
IMO, there’s no point in fighting the copycats (provided you’re successful enough to have copycats in the first place)… For one, they’re actually helping you out, by glorifying your game, and also, they dig their own graves, since the public usually has very little tolerance for ripoffs…
Over time I’ve noticed a pattern… Whatever effort you make in trying to hide, protect, encrypt or otherwise make it difficult for people to crack open your game, will only result in making YOU look bad.
Take the Assassin’s Creed 2 debacle, for example… Ubisoft spent god knows how much in that horribly aggressive DRM scheme that forced you to be online to play the single-player game…
They took it down a week or so later after release, since not only it didn’t help to curb pirated copies, the pirated copies had no such DRM… making them effectively a better option. It looked pretty bad for Ubisoft.
IMO, the best thing one can do about data protection for games, is nothing.
This topic kind of reminded me of Limbo of the Lost and its quite hilarious levels of Plagiarism (I only wish they had stolen some good voice acting as well…)
Please, “Your art IS stolen”.
soz.
I still think some protection is necessary- at least make it difficult. If they crack it, well, they’ve cracked it. You can’t stop it once it’s down and done.
Here’s a related question - if it’s impossible for something to be completely 100% protected, and it’s impossible for one person to therefore have complete 100% ownership of something (ie in a way that nobody else can access it), then doesn’t that mean that we all share ownership of everything naturally?
No.
Ownership has nothing to do with things being protected. Ownership has to do with rights and if you aren’t granted a right to do or use something you just don’t have it, if you still do it, you are breaking existing laws and its up to the owner of the rights to take or not take legal steps against you either to make you stop or to even pay the damage
You’re right in your explaination of law but that’s not what I was suggesting. Philosophically, if nothing can be protected completely then nobody can truly claim to 100% own anything, regardless of what the law says, which means that the way the universe works we all naturally share everything.
