Distribution and copy protection of Unity games

I love your narrative; how did you get there based on what I wrote, just elude me.

A nebulous threat assume that it may or may not happen. Sofware is pirated as often as people breathe. There is nothing nebulous about that; just search for your favorite software or game on pirate sites and you will find it there. Including games that are not even released.

Also who did say that there is any hope or objective to convert people and have them buy the game; if there was no piracy?
In a bit we start to talk about travel in space, if we continue with fiction in this way.

 

Considering you're dismissing every statement against copy protection systems and insinuating that people who disregard it cannot be making money, it's a safe bet you don't really care about the opinions of other developers unless they align with yours.

 

Your focus is on stopping people from playing something they haven't paid for. Their focus is on generating the most income for the business.

From the latter perspective, reducing piracy is irrelevant except where you are converting pirates to customers. And that's a valid answer to your question, even if it's not one that you like - they don't worry about piracy or DRM, they instead focus on sales and satisfying their customers.

 

I don't believe it is backward. You want to put your product in front of as many potential customers as you can; but when you identify the people that won't be your customers anyway; they are useless for your purpose. Between 10 people that want your game and 9 pirate it; I take 1 person that just buy the game. I still get 1 sale either way.

Some will still pirate the game; but it will take them time, and they prefer to spend that time for the division or assassin's creed cracked, not for your indie game. It is as simple as that. People are lazy, they go where they get the max return for minimum effort.

AAA can afford to invest in copy protection, it is a different realm, financially speaking. Indies with few resources, have to be creative. Most companies that sell copy protection algorithms, do not even engage with you, unless you have a track record and some visibility. So on top of being expensive, they may even ditch your product altogether.

I agree on increasing sales; but if you sell 100 copies every 3 months; even 10 pirated copies have an influence on you. Then of course if you make asset flip abominations and put them on steam every 2 weeks, that is not a big deal. Once you flood the market with jokes called games, or with mobile clones with ads and time-based recharge skills to frustrate players into buy a boost, things are much different. These are not in the same realm as the one buy classic computer game.

Indeed going your own is the worst possible outcome, because then you have the burden of implement everything.

And it is a given that every system can be cracked; although I can give you examples of applications that no matter what, they were never available on pirate sites, because either too niche, or because people didn't want to even waste time with them.

Visibility is a double edge sword; everyone wants something that is appealing, because of a campaign or good marketing videos and promos. Same as chances that someone hack your email; in relation to how famous are you. Probably nobody wants our pictures, but someone may want our SSN or bank account. For a game goes the same way; if it is prominently features, people want it and someone will spend time cracking it. If I would sell enough copies to compensate for the small loss due to piracy, that would be golden for me.

Due to my position, being an indie product, the best I would do is to use Steam or to implement a key code that require a one time activation, tied to the hardware of the computer on which you register the app. That is enough to discourage the average joe, so whoever wants to really crack your application, can still do it, but at least you did what you can.

 

I ask you what you do; the answer I get is that drm do not work. This count as "dismiss"?

I didn't dismiss statements against DRM; I pointed out that DRM is only one way to protect your software. If all we talk is DRM; then I think I can use at least 4 different techniques that does not include anything currently used, and sell it at this point.

Is DRM through a 3rd party company, the only thing that exist? Of course not, but everyone seems so focused on that.

So far I heard, beside your last links which were very informative, few said that they did not implement anything, and one approach of embrace piracy and try to make them your friends. And DRM of course.

There is nothing to bet; it is a conversation, nobody wins

 

The average joe doesn't crack games themselves. We have already covered this. The average joe, when it comes to piracy, just goes to a site and downloads the version that was cracked by an above average joe because unless you verify all action directly with something like a constant server connection to pipe down game data, the entire game is already on their computer.

All DRM schemes do is annoy legitimate customers. This, too, has been covered.

edit: And yes, everything you have proposed so far is a DRM scheme.

 

I agree with using whatever your chosen vendor's default solution is, for exactly the reason you mention - it's relatively low effort and will help prevent casual piracy.

What you've said here suggests you haven't done a lot of research into this yourself, though. Steam doesn't tie things to hardware, it ties them to the user account. Tying stuff to hardware may well go against Steam's rules by restricting what their customers can do. Also, you only need keys for Steam products if you purchase them outside of Steam and, from what I can tell, allowing this makes it much easier for people to pirate your game (dodgy key resellers at least used to be a significant issue).

This doesn't support your argument.

Are you honestly saying that, in this scenario, you'd rather spend your limited time and resources to stop 10 people from pirating your game than concentrate on increasing past 100 sales per quarter? The 100 sales per quarter is a much bigger problem than the 10 pirated copies!

 

Yes, because it's not just me that you're dismissing. You're dismissing everyone who has said it.

While dismissing any discussions regarding the value of implementing it.

 

Excuse me for spending time making something, and have the weird idea that I should not be concerned about people not paying Can you give me your address? I am sure you won't mind me grabbing stuff from your home, right? Also please I like black coffee. Let's joke on it because it seems that the whole topic is a joke in the end.

The original post, asked what do you do to protect your shipped product. And look where we are now Then you wonder why trying to have a simple straight conversation is so hard these days.

So from what you are saying, the majority focus on sale and do not care about protecting their work. Let's see how many games made with Unity are available out there without being cracked. If your statement is correct, I won't find cracked versions of most of the games, because nobody bother to protect them, as such they should be out there. I suspect that part of the games are indeed not protected, but not the majority.

 

Correction... dodgy key resellers could be worse than piracy. Not because they steal your product, but because they steal your customers (ie: people give money to the pirates rather than to you).

 

The average joe, before going to a site; ask on reddit if someone has this or that software. They do not crack them, they get the folder with the unity executable and resources, and put it on his hard drive and play the game.

I never implied that the average joe "crack" anything...otherwise they are not average joes IF you distribute your product as is; and when someone buy it, they get a zip with the unity game in it, with no protection. Nothing stop them from posting it anywhere, as zip, for every average joe to get.

And we don't like to make it that easy for these average joe, right?

Generally speaking everything is a DRM, yes; but as you may read on the main post; I explicitly made a difference between 3rd party companies DRM and other means. If we want to be diving into semantics, then it is a whole different story.

 

You made the thread the way it is. Every other thread we've had on this topic has had actual discussions.

 

It's all well and good to not like it. I don't like it either. I doubt anyone here likes the idea of people taking their commercial stuff without paying for it.

However, that doesn't mean that I think it's a good idea to try to spend time or effort or money or resources or stress on it. Whether it's right or wrong, I'm thinking about how I can best use my limited resources to maximise income for my business.

At the point where "reduce piracy" reaches the top of that list I'll certainly put effort into it. Until then, I've better things to do.

For the sake of clarification (you said English isn't your primary language), no, that is not what I'm saying. I was speaking from my own experience, and offering an explanation to a specific question you asked of a specific person.

 

This is literally nothing like how modern piracy works.

 

Is it still all torrent programs and [removed] and people with lots of non-alphanumeric characters in their usernames?

Edit: It's common knowledge, but on second thought I still shouldn't advertise it...

 

This is indeed what I pointed out in the initial post. Then someone drag the horse down the river, and the whole topic became I don't even know what.

The protection I described was an "or" to steam. With steam you integrate their DLL in your app, the whole authentication for a game is out of the developer hand, and that has its advantages, since you don't have to be concerned about such details. Just follow the instructions and at least you get rid of occasional pirates. Generating keys via hash generated using system ID of peripherals, is a common practice; and orthogonal to Steam. I would not go that way unless there was no other viable solution.

No, I said that once I am done with the game; either I am focusing on promoting the game or on fixing bugs or on expansions or extra content. Both sales and piracy are off my hands; I can only implement countermeasures and promote my product; the rest is up to many events that we do not control. If all you need is to be Chris Roberts and ask for money on kickstarter, things would be different. For common people, things are random, and out of 12 products I did work on, only 4 did make it to the point where they were even worth the costs. Some does not even get to their second project, so I consider myself lucky.

 

We're past the point that you need to be more than just average to be able to "crack" a program. YouTube is not just an amazing resource for legal activities. It's an amazing resource for illegal ones too. A quick search for "pirate battlefield v" comes up with multiple step-by-step instructions that any kid could perform.

YouTube tries to stomp them out but that's just as much a losing battle as is DRM.

Edit: Incidentally EA was using Denuvo again.

 

We live in different worlds then, what should I say.

 

Youtube has also illegal songs and videos. Or the occasional snuff video or kids posting questionable stuff. You can indeed find everything on it these days.

Although, when I was looking for a video to rip Unity web player content from a site; they were not that helpful. That was actually the first time that I found a way to keep stuff away from non-paying people, but then Unity discontinued the web player.
A similar approach used by sketchfab I believe, to avoid people ripping their 3d models. Not sure about the details but you hear a lot of complains about how hard is to rip their models.

With that said; if you give a zip with your game to a person, they take 2 minutes to copy and distribute it. If you add even a simple key; not sure if there is a video on youtube that show you how to disassemble and de-compile the source to remove it. While it is easier to find resources, you still need a decent amount of technical know-how to bypass common protections.

You can mod consoles too; there are videos; although most of the people are not that bright; and even with the video they brick their console. As such they fear to brick the console and avoid to do it. Limited protection, but better than nothing

 

Pirate Bay and other such sites, but that's the entire situation. The only time people don't use it is when it's some weird, obscure thing like point of sale software or something.

 

For the heck of it, I went to a random torrent site and entered the name of an indie game that dropped yesterday. There was already an available, decently seeded torrent from a VIP (so basically verified actual uploads) member. That is piracy today.

 

How much is the game and on which platform is sold? Just to get an idea of the visibility and units sold already on the original platform.

 

Sure, but you're only considering one vector, and only one actor.

As has already been raised (and ignored?), people don't need to do the cracking themselves. A handful of people do that, then they post it to places where other people can download it at large. After that, copying it is as easy as your example with a zip. In fact, after that, copying is basically as easy as buying stuff on Steam or other legitimate storefronts.

No, we all live in the same world, it's just that we've each only seen little bits of it. You're right, some people pirate stuff by copy-pasting files. @Murgilod is also right that lots of people pirate via torrents. You may not be directly exposed to people who do that, but you are in the same world as them, so you should probably take it into account.

 

Just went to fix some food and while I was waiting for the microwave to finish it dawned on me that I had neglected to mention a great example of a successful indie that only uses a very primitive copy protection system (the game generates a four-digit pin, you email it to him, and he emails you back a different four-digit pin).

Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb Software). If you fast forward to roughly 43 minutes he mentions that he made $750,000 in 2011.

Spoiler: GDC Video

 

We start from the assumption that nobody cracked your game yet.
If there is not enough interest, games are not cracked. I did plenty of search on various products and the measure in which they were pirated, because for a period I was in a division that had the unholy duty of find out sites that were pirating the software that my company produced. It was a lot of legwork, getting on sites, creating accounts to get in the circle, and then collect IP and personal information of people spreading software illegally, so they can be persecuted.

You would be surprised how many ding-dongs connect to a torrent from their home Comcast or ATT account; without even run through a proxy; and then cry when they get in trouble, and all for saving 30 bucks.

Anyway, back on the main point: if your game does not sell enough, nobody would bother cracking it. Once it is cracked, you get it easily, that is true, but before that point, you still have protection.

So to your second point, I am exposed to piracy in a way or another. Before I used to track them down, now I work to make software more secure, for companies that can afford to pay the research. Although my personal activity as indie game developer is on a different plane; and as such I have to deal with things on a much smaller scale.

 

This is a great story; and seems that is showing that simple counter measures do not fix the issue but limit the problem.

 

Steam, $20.

 

And this is something your gonna need to come to terms with. Piracy often isn't optional to some people. and if they ever want to play your game they absolutely require piracy to access it. Otherwise they won't be ever use it, period. Can't afford it, wont buy it. If anything - if you ever make a product that gets popular enough to be pirated - I'd be very flattered. If you are reaching enough people and the word is out, enough that users are actually willing to steal your product.... you sir, have succeeded.

Seriously - piracy won't be stomped out no matter how much time and effort you put into protecting your product - they will find a way to crack it. Many devs release a pirated version of their own game (I think it was "game dev tycoon" or a similar game that had some hilarious message) that has silly limitation because they know they are going to be pirated because they made something interesting and some people won't be able to purchase it. This can also be viewed from the side of decompilation of your code, your art, your assets being picked and taken from the finished product and used in ways you never expected, and your gonna just need to deal with that too. Again in this situation - its more or less a big nod that you have succeeded already and your raking in enough dough that honestly it doesn't matter. I'd take it as a badge of honor.

 

Is this thread part of your research too?

 

One interesting thing I picked up regarding piracy on Steam is that pirated player's account names are blank.

If the game is hacked/pirated from the Steam version, (which mine was), player's are not authenticating through a Steam account, so their player names from the Steam SDK were being pushed up to Gamesparks as blank.

Now having lots of game logic/data on the server side, can help with this. In the new player registration, is the username from Steam coming through blank? Great! Just throw an error. No need to give any info in the error to help pirates hack the game, just return an UNKNOWN_ERROR code or whatever you feel like.

But I never did this, one benefit of having pirated players is that it helped grow my multiplayer user base, so players found games more often, than having to wait in matchmaking and not find a match.

What I did do was reject any leaderboard entries from user's with blank names. Did you just set a top 10 leaderboard record for the long jump event, but pirated the game?? Great, but you won't be famous unfortunately

 

As an observer, of this thread, I can see very one sided point of view, which continuously trying to be highlighted.
Reading, feels like someone try to forcefully persuade how pirating is bad and there is no benefits but only harm.
Also, some weird conclusions and comment here and there, in form of responses, which doesn't fit. But digressing.

First of all, if someone pirates software, or game, don't steel in the seance, as someone steel from a home.
Mostly is just missed opportunity off sell to particular person. But if someone don't want to buy, will not buy anyway. Hence not really loosing anything. Maybe with some fractional exceptions.
Also, not everyone earns in $$$, or has deep pockets.

Then already highlighted, if some product is worth to be cracked, it will be, so is rather pointless spending significant effort on introducing complexity, and potential frustrations to genuine users. Then need be dealt with them and bunch of scams and loosing further time. Even responding to every post here, seams is following opposite principle.

And foremost, partially mentioned by previous posters, any owner of product (here game, or other software), is your potential customer. By either possibly buying this, other, or another future product. And of course there is aspect, ignored in whole on this thread, like "Word of Mouth". Assuming no need for expansion upon that.

 

If so, that would explain the bias. In the end, need to convince a company to pay

 

No, I don't do research, I used to get assigned researchers to my department (as engineers, not as marketing) . But this was my old job, I don't do that anymore

 

You guys should drop development and move to fiction. I am serious. You are scary for how much you sway with your brain.

 

This is interesting, so you actually saw users connecting to your service via Steam? From what I noticed, when a steam game is cracked, it require you to be offline, so no data goes up.

It is fascinating that you accept pirates for the purpose of showing that you have more players; I am glad that my product is not tied to any sort of multiplayer; but I am happy that it is working for you.

 

It doesn't connect to Steam, it connects to Gamesparks, another service entirely that's handling the multiplayer backend.

 

I get the player's name from the Steam SDK (inside the client), then push up that name to Gamesparks. And no, you don't need to be offline to play a cracked Steam game.

It's not for the purpose of 'showing that I have more players', its for the purpose of having more people available in multiplayer to race against, so my paying players can have a better experience and I can get more player usage data into my analytics platform.

 

I guess I should raise my hand here, then. As far as copy protection goes, it's minimal at best. People pirate our games, and people buy our games. I figure if EA and Ubisoft and Activision et al. throw tons of money at preventing piracy and still fail, there's no real point in me spending much time and money to attempt to do what they couldn't do. I only hope that if people like our games they buy them, and that's as much thought as I care to put into it, really.

In addition, I literally included a quote from a good review on one of our game pages. That review was from a pirate site.

 

Sorry, I don't get your response. Doesn't fit to the context. But nvm. Is probably irrelevant.

 

As a small nobody, I'd look at getting pirated, as a sign of success.

 

Perhaps there's a misunderstanding here? You did say that...

 

So if stopping piracy isn't to protect revenues from the game, then I'd argue it is a waste of time and money.

 

Then I am concerned about English comprehension.

My work is to secure software; not to research polling people. I manage people and use my past experiences to write code. I request researchers to code, for my department, since I can't write everything and manage everything at the same time; they cost money, as such not every company can afford to hire a team of such individuals.

In the professional world, a "researcher" is not only the guy with the white coat in the lab; or the one that does polls and investigate by surveying. It is a prominent figure that does much more than that. Maybe this is not known to the average person?

Now if you can help me understand how my original sentence you quoted, and my detailed explanation, tie with the idea that I do "research" by going on forums to ask unknown people any sort of question related to piracy, I would appreciate the help. I found it amusing because require a good amount of skills in disregard what a sentence means, and just follow the rabbit down the hole of the mind.

I didn't mean to say it in an offensive way, it is just that I rarely find people that instead of ask me what do I mean, go for their own fictional story.

 

In part it is, I am not saying that it is beneficial from the monetary part, except if you are AAA studio or have big financial investors behind you.

We did all agree that you can't stop piracy; but that does not mean that nobody should do anything, in the measure of what they consider beneficial.

Ony did post above that for her, the gain is not worth the hassle to implement protection, that is a choice that each developer has to make; based on the volume of sales they have.

 

If you type a sentence and most people that read it understand something different than what you meant, I think it's you who has a problem.

 

Not familiar with this workflow; thanks for the clarification.

So you "use" pirates as entertainment for your paying customers; it is beneficial for you; in which case the pirate is not a parasite, because suck resources away from you, but can be considered as a mutualistic entity. You both gain from it: you get more players to entertain paying customers, and they get the game for free. That works like a charm in your case.

 

I am in the wrong audience then; So it is not really my problem; I can ignore this audience and continue to interact with the professional audience; which is able to understand without problems what I say, or has enough intellectual prowess to ask clarifications.

 

Off you go then.

 

So honored that you allow me to go. Not sure if you got the memo but we are 7+B people on this planet, so the beauty is to ignore the ones you don't interact with.
So looking forward for the 7+B people still left, minus the few that I now see as incompatible with me. Have fun out there, do not open the door too fast.

 

Good luck with that. Short of discussing it with the management staff that make the call to use DRM, you'll quickly discover that the opinions we've presented are the same as the "professionals" you claim to be seeking. You can keep ignoring it if you want but eventually you will run out of people to ignore.