Hi Dennis,
Thanks for taking the time to explain that further. I found it very
enlightening.
I guess there are ways I had not thought about to further secure a
client side game.
Much appreciated,
Ian Reed
On 5/1/2013 9:41 AM, Dennis Towne wrote:
Ian,
Obviously, games which have nearly all of the content hosted only on
the server, such as muds, are much more piracy proof, but there are a
lot of shades of grey in between fully server side and fully client
side. Yes, there will always be ways to hack game executables, but
some are a lot harder than others.
One of the easiest ways is to use some form of downloadable content,
with unique crypto keys per client and per account. The idea would be
that when it's time to play chapter 2 for the first time, you have to
download and decrypt the chapter from the server, and the encryption
is tied to your account. You give the file to somebody else, it
doesn't work. You give your keys to somebody else, it doesn't work.
You hack out the little piece of code that does authentication, and
you can no longer decrypt the file, and it doesn't work.
There's a lot of weaker ways of handling things too, and no sane
developer would expect any of these to be perfect - they merely have
to be hard enough to work around that it isn't easy to just give the
crack to someone else. If LeetHacker6 manages to crack and decrypt
the game, that's fine - but if he can't easily give the crack to other
people, it's not going to be as big a problem as just posting valid
keys to a bulletin board.
The final piece of the puzzle is that all of this stuff has to be
completely invisible to real players. Real players buy the game,
start it up, and want to play. If the protections fail or go stupid,
all the player knows is that the game sucks and won't work right.
Dennis Towne
Alter Aeon MUD
http://www.alteraeon.com
On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Ian Reed <supp...@blindaudiogames.com> wrote:
Hi Dennis,
You said: This is why I won't bother to produce any standalone games unless
I
intend to give them away. Anyone who thinks they can sell standalone
games without strong 'phone home' server authorization and make money
is fooling themselves.
I say: Very interesting comment.
I'd like to break down the strong 'phone home' server authorization term to
understand it better.
Obviously game clients that require a server in order to play are very
piracy proof.
Your Alter Aeon is a good example of this though you do not charge for
player accounts, but if you did it should be easy to ensure any created
account had to be paid for.
Were you also implying that a standalone game that for instance, contacts a
server every time it is opened and does not let someone play unless the
server could be contacted would be pirated less than one that just uses an
unlock code?
Or did the line stop with a game client that actually requires the server to
play?
From things I read ages ago I got the impression that a game could be
patched to take out the small bit of logic that contacts the server just as
elete hackers can reverse engineer your executable to see what key
generation scheme you use.
If that is the case then I don't know of any anti piracy mechanism that
would stop elete hackers except for the game really being on the server and
the player only having access to the client.
And if piracy rates are as high as you say it is a pretty difficult problem.
Ian Reed
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