How to Stop Hackers from stealing my Assets

Okay, so I've been working on my indie game for a while and I'm just about ready to release a demo version or "preview" / roughdraft of my fututre mmo. However, I'm kinda afraid someone will steal all my graphics and just use it in their game. Is there a way to protect my Unity Assets?

I know that when the game is compiled that the memory cannot be accessed unless someone has a program that can basically unzip everything. (I know unzip isn't the right terminology)

I guess what I'm asking is, is there a way to protect my game from programs like Cheat Engine? (Even though, it's just a prototype?)

I plan on releasing my demo on itch.io.

(Recent video of my game)

 

Unity games are relatively easy to decompose and extract relevant bits (assets).
So no really means of fully protecting your asset.
You can add some extra hoops, but still, if someone will be willing to grab something from your game, then person will.

I know there are assets, which helps on that matter, but question is, weather is worth time and effort, rather than focus on your game making.

Regarding cheating, just make game server authoring based, rather relying on client.
Specially if we talk MMO like games.

 

If you make a worthy game, someone will steal all of your graphics. This is how it works.

Be prepared to protect your IP and your copyright. Create a template mail with a friendly note to notify stores/people to remove your content from their store/site. If you're like me and have no idea how to do it, contact a lawyer (preferably who takes care of IP, trademark and/or copyright cases) and pay her/him to write one for you.

No. In general game assets (and other application assets which ends up on the end user's computer in general) are reachable (for example just search the internet for "extract game assets <insert-random-game-name-here>").
The only safe way to keep your assets out of people's hand if you don't give them and shove them away in an offline safe on a disk.

My advise is you should concentrate on your game. If you notice someone using your assets, send a take down notice. That's all you can do and should do.

 

It is little bit hard in internet people are getting together and buying asset for example X asset is 50$ 5 people getting together and everyone pay 10$ after that they export package from other pc.There is a specific forums for this act like cgpeers.com unfortunately you cant do too much thinks for prevent this online robbing.Maybe in future unity will make some security system for this but I dont think so.

 

This is equal to steeling, as asset are typically licensed per seat. So purchase can be owned by one person.

 

Agreed. ESPECIALLY when it comes to MMO's. Dude, for my game, I'm not letting the client know a thing. All of my data that I need for the game is stored in a Database. (Thus to prevent people from manipulating data they don't have access to) and, I'm using protected classes and protected variables.

Yeah I know. Honestly, I wouldn't mind because I would take it as a compliment that I've gotten that far in life. I grew up and learned how to make graphics by "ripping" them from other games. So, if I do inspire someone that much to make a game by ripping my own game, then great!

On the other side, I just don't want someone my graphics and then releasing their game as my game before I get a chance to release mine.

I don't think anyone can take my assets yet because, I haven't shared the game anywhere. As for IP, I'm going to be speaking with a lawyer sometime this week. Hopefully, I should be able to get some things cleared up.

Or make it an internet browser game. Perhaps if I made my game with Javascript and kept it in browser, I wouldn't have this problem. However, I'm not going to worry about that right now. For now, I'm going to focus on completing my game before I release it.

You see, I had this great idea that I could release the demo version of my project and have people donate money to my project. This will help my YouTube channel, as well as help keep me afloat while I make the game. However, now, since I know there's a chance of the game being ripped off, I think it's too early in it's development stages to be released at all.

 

If you have things in there which resembles the final assets, it is not. If your mechanics mostly work it is not too early. It's about the right time or even a bit late.
Of course you shouldn't release it for the money, you should share your work for the feedback. To find out if it is fun to play for others as well. Also to see where you're lacking context. You know we humans tend to reassemble pieces of things with out brain, it is how it works. Throw fractured information at someone and they will come up with a story of their own using the info they get.
There is this team building game (usually I hate those, but this is particularly useful for two things): form a line, the first person think a short story (1-2 sentences), maybe even play it. Then everyone allowed to receive this story from the front neighbor and pass it to the rear neighbor. At the end, you can compare the original story to the end result. Since people are bad communicators but they good at pulling pieces of information together and make up the missing pieces you will end up a completely different story at the end.
And this is true to everything (this is why eye-witnesses worth nothing).
So if you want to get your own story through and your experience, you need to test it. Because your mind will make up the missing pieces when you play your own story/game.
Pretty much the only way to get around this if you share your work and compare the story you intend and the story other people are building.

I mostly use the word "story" here, but it is true to almost every aspects of a videogame, including emotions and mechanics.

Well, there is this thing called browser cache... everything you have on your computer can be grabbed. That's not the question, the question is what they are doing with it publicly.

 

Web JavaScript data is even more trivial to extract. Just saying.

 

I wouldn't worry about it that much. Stealing your assets from your game doesn't really cost you anything. It isn't going to cost your game any sales. Even if you are selling your assets on the Asset Store, the type of person who would steal your assets, or buy from a place which caters to stolen assets, was never going to buy your assets from you.

The same thing is true in general about software piracy. Software pirates don't steal your game to save themselves some money, since they were never going to buy your game.

Just prepare yourself to send take down notices and similar legal complaints about your assets as @Lurking-Ninja stated.

 

Wow, that's interesting. A very interesting experiment. I will keep this noted when I start testing my game. I guess you guys are right. Maybe I'm just paranoid about being ripped off?

You have a point.

Noted.

 

I was just reading through this, and Stadia came to mind.

To be clear, I haven't looked into it much and I don't know any of the details of how it works, but wouldn't using Stadia avoid this problem?

If I understand correctly, the only thing the end user sees when using Stadia is "video footage" of your game, meaning your assets never touch their computer, which in turn means they can't be stolen.

Again, maybe I'm misinformed and this isn't the case at all, but I thought it'd be worth bringing up.

 

@tomweiland This is exactly how it will work.

 

The presented assets don't seem like a target anyone would want to steal, and if they do, they aren't legally allowed to sell it, thus you are protected mostly for your situation.

 

Yeah, I figured that after a while ago. My models aren't the greatest.

Stadia? I did a google search and found this:

https://store.google.com/product/stadia

Is this what you are talking about?

 

@MW_Industries this link brings me to google nest (altough it says stadia): See the official youtube channel from google about more information:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQKyy9Wl7hsVn1BP7BC53Yg

It is a streaming platform from google. You pay a monthly fee and buy games and just stream them with very light hardware required.

 

As I understand it, if you use Google Stadia, players' computers send their input to Google, Google's computers process the input and send back the resulting camera output. It's basically like you're streaming a video, but it's a game and you can provide input.

 

From what I watched in the google video, it seems like another platform however, that being said, I'm very interested in releasing my game on this platform as well. I'll get into the technical sides of it later.

Hey man, thanks. This video pretty much cleared up everything. It's very interesting. I'm definitely going to get my game on it.