How do you stop your game from being stolen/torrented?

I want to ask, are there any experienced developers out there that have dealt with the issue?

My suggestion: save the efforts to avoid the unavoidable and put it into polishing your game to attract more paying customers.

Steam gives you some DRM solutions built in. If you only sell via steam, you can just rely on those.

For an online game, you can authenticate all the users when they talk to your servers. This way, pirates will be locked out of the online portions of the game.
Quite a few devs are making their single-player games actually reliant on online servers, just to make piracy harder. e.g. One dev I work with actually doesn't ship most of their code with the game, instead an online server streams scripts to clients on demand...
That kind of thing really annoys players though...

are there any experienced developers out there that have dealt with the issue?

been there, been hacked, lost the company.

the only way to keep your software secure is to not put all of it on the users device.

short of that, there's drm technologies, hardware, software, or internet based. and any drm also requires anti-hack technology to protect the drm code.

when i first faced the issue, i developed an in-house hardware (key disk) based copy protection scheme, but with no anti-hack protection. that was sufficient for many years. the free online demo wasn't the whole game, and no registered user ever hacked the games. when digital distribution became the rave, i jumped on board the bandwagon like an idiot, and went to software (registration password based on hardware ID) drm, with no anti-hack protection. now the demo had the whole game, all you had to do was enter a password to mach your hardware id - or hack around the password checking code. Soon after the release of the software DRM demo, sales suddenly dropped to near zero. i discovered the game had been hacked, then posted on a website by a guy in nigeria with an isp in china, on a server in russia, or some such thing. lost the company, had to get a real job.

The ironic thing is i still get fan mail from folks who only played the hacked version - thinking it was a legit version.

The title that got hacked was Caveman v1.3.

Whether folks will buy legit vs download hacked depends on how rich they feel, how easy it is to find and download, and their morals. Unfortunately, the average impoverished college student will download rather than paying if possible (hey - that means more beer money- right?), or doing without due to moral principals.

How do you stop your game from being torrented?

You cant.

How do you stop your game from being torrented?

You cant.

Not only can't you (short of some always-online type solutions), there's little evidence showing that's it's necessarily a bad thing (and before any passionate replies, I'm not weighing in here on the ethics of piracy, simply the effects of it. And, while yes, there are studies suggesting it can be detrimental, there are similar studies showing otherwise, and as far as I can tell, both conclusions seem to fall into how the data is interpreted as piracy numbers are difficult to interpret as they're not always lost sales, often overlap with paying customers, sometimes spur sales, etc, It's a complex beast).

I think what generally drives piracy is lack of availability/distribution, heavy-handed DRM, or prohibitively high costs. I'd suggest if you want the smallest possible amount of people pirating your game, make it accessible, affordable, and not burdened with drm obstacles. While there will always be people who will pirate the game regardless, these things push away otherwise paying customers, and it's this latter group that you should be concerned with. If you don't want to lose sales from people in other countries, make it available there. If you don't want to lose sales from people on a budget, make it affordable to them, etc.

Basically, start with the assumption that it will be pirated, but don't worry about that group, because they weren't going to buy your game anyway, and focus on offering the best possible product to potential customers.

Hey guys,

The last game i made was Only If, a first person mystery game. It was intended to only be on Gamejolt & Steam although it was still uploaded to multiple other sites without my permission, it didn't bother me since the game was free.

But my worry is that the new game I'm developing now is going to have a price tag. I want to ask, are there any experienced developers out there that have dealt with the issue?

Share your stories please, i'd like to understand whats going to hit & how you guys dealt with it.

Hire a blackhat to ddos anyone who starts the torrents. Legally? No idea.

Well, one of the ideas is to make secret checks deep inside the game code. When a pirated copy is detected, in addition to prevent game loading up, also deliberately mess up some game logic/rendering. Make it look intentional, or the software will look buggy. Like the large toilet thing in Sims 4, it is harder to track down a multiplying in dissembly and there is no obvious API calls around.

Try not to use a single type of executable check or that would be a weakness point for hacker to focus on.

Well, one of the ideas is to make secret checks deep inside the game code. When a pirated copy is detected, in addition to prevent game loading up, also deliberately mess up some game logic/rendering. Make it look intentional, or the software will look buggy. Like the large toilet thing in Sims 4, it is harder to track down a multiplying in dissembly and there is no obvious API calls around.

Try not to use a single type of executable check or that would be a weakness point for hacker to focus on.

The problem with that is when people start reviewing the game on metacritic, or even on piracy sites saying "This game's a buggy piece of crap. Not worth a download/buy"

There is always a loop hole in every system . And so Piracy cant be prevented but can only be minimized (like Hodgman said above is one solution to minimize it). The only way to prevent your game "being stolen/torrented" is to make it open source .

I think your main concern should be to get as many people as possible to play the game. Would you rather have 1,000 sales and no illegal downloads or 10,000 sales and one million illegal downloads? I would think of every illegal download as a potential new customer instead of a lost one: especially if you're an indie developer. Making the game affordable and making it easily accessible by placing it on sites such as Steam and GOG would do more to combat piracy than any anti-piracy measure you could ever come up with yourself. You could also do a Kickstarter for the game before you release it and earn some money that way.

SOL-2517 has the right idea: Most of the time, you should not even be thinking about pirates. You should be thinking about total players.

Every game has a "funnel" of some kind, which you can think as a series of filters - each filter is a barrier-to-entry, removing a subset of your potential player base. The first filter is whether or not the player has even heard of your game. The next filter is whether it keeps their interest enough to think about playing it. Is it a genre they like? Do their friends like it? How is the review score? Does it have lots of bugs? How expensive is it? Do the developers help people on their forums?

You always want your game's funnel to let as many people in as possible. If you are aware of the funnel, you can think of more ways to get players in the door.


Pirates are just people who are using a slightly different funnel than the one legitimate people use.

Make a free demo. Some people pirate games because they're worried that they won't like it, and want to "try before they buy". Then they end up getting lazy after playing all the way through and decide "I don't like it ENOUGH to buy it." A demo gives them enough experience to decide if they like the game or not, AND tempts them into a purchase with the unknowns of additional features/content in the full game.

Think of ways to make people feel good about buying your game. Is there some benefit the non-pirates enjoy that pirates don't? *Optional* online features such as Borderlands' Golden Keys system might work.

Never make your game more convenient to pirate than to play legally. I'm talking about always-online stuff that many of the big publishers try to do recently (Uplay, Origin, etc). Players don't like that nonsense.

Not all pirates are bad: Pirates have friends. Some of those friends may not be quite as big of a pirate and could buy your game. Depending on how things work with the game, the friend may even be able to convince the pirate to buy the game so that they can play online together. Nothing is quite as powerful as peer pressure.

Above all: NEVER PISS OFF ANY PLAYER - pirate or otherwise. If a pirate thinks, "you know, these developers are pretty cool, actually... I feel kinda bad about pirating from them," that is a win even if they still don't buy your game.

more thoughts:

there's 2 parts to piracy

1. cracking DRM

2. illegal re-distribution of non-DRM protected software - either software that has no DRM to begin with (such as Only if) or has been cracked (like Caveman v1.3) .

there exists in the world an engineering hobby / discipline called "cracking". its about reverse-engineering and modifying games. the payoff for crackers is posting their work so the world can see how awesome they are.

if you eliminate the payoff for crackers, you don't get cracked.

so open source, free games etc don't get cracked,

ALSO - limited DEMOs that don't include the full game don't get cracked!

the recurring theme here is "there's nothing to crack - no glory".

prior to Caveman v1.3, i only used limited demos, and keydisk DRM. these was nothing to crack in the online demos, and the keydisk meant any upload was no good, and no cracker will buy a game to crack it, as there are too may free games to play around with. so i was safe.

I didn't become a target for piracy until i went to a demo that could be cracked to turn it into the full game.

so then they had something to crack - a challenge!

so once your DRM is removed by cracking, then they post the results to get their profs from their peers (other crackers).

now comes into play the second part of piracy: illegal re-distribution of non-drm protected software.

basically you'll have two types of folks who will download a cracked game:

1. folks who know its a cracked game. they may want to try it but there's no playable demo. they may not be able to afford it in the first place - so they're not a potential customer anyway.

2. folks who don't know its cracked. they just think its a cool game and have no idea they are receiving ":stolen" goods. these are lost sales.

at the end of the day, if someone likes the game, they will buy it (if they can afford it), but first they must realize its not free, and second its very difficult to sell something to someone who already has one (such as a full (cracked) version of your game on their hard drive). so don't rely on potential customers playing cracked versions, then buying the legit version as "the right thing to do".

when implementing anti-crack technology, as mentioned above, how you respond to detected cracking can leave the impression that your game is buggy. especially if the player doesn't know its cracked. of course, by then its too late, cause you've already been cracked.

in the end it becomes an arms race. you release with drm, they crack it. you release with new drm, and new features to give the users a reason to buy the new version vs DL'ing the cracked current version. then they crack the new version, and the cycle begins again. the idea with this approach is your drm should hold up long enough for you to get a new version ready. this approach is very common with small business app devs.

the only real solution is "nothing to crack - thus no glory - on to the next game"

limited demos, free games, DRM on full version to prevent customers from simply posting it, "ET phone home" (server side authentication of users), streaming code from servers - all these approaches leave nothing to crack, or prevent/deter illegal re-distribution of unprotected code.

a limited playable demo and some simple DRM on full versions sold is probably the best approach these days.

remember its all about the glory - take away their [the cracker's] chance at glory, and you (and more importantly - your game) no longer exist in their universe.

FYI one of the entries in one of my dev journals here has a lot of info on DRM and anti-crack technology

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1729/entry-2258666-anti-crack-info/

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1729/entry-2258667-gamedev-tycoon-vs-crackers/

You can't stop the pirates, period. You can slow them down, perhaps, but any measures you employ in this way will also potentially block and irritate your legitimate customers. It's my opinion that you should simply not waste brain power worrying about locking pirates out of your single-player campaign. A better strategy, if it fits, is to have a compelling online component (whether its required or optional is a separate choice, but for me it needs to be optional in the sense that I must be able to play single-player portions of the game without a network connection.) this could be co-op or pvp gameplay, or it could be highscore/social compoenents, or even something like facebook integration -- basically any carrot to entice the user to want to connect online -- and then you verify that they are legit, which encourages them to pay up. This also prevents you from incurring any service expenses on behalf of pirates (you'll only provide network services to paying customers)

Its also generally a mistake to think that every time someone has downloaded your game illegally that it equates to a lost sale, so view piracy stats with a huge grain of salt. I saw a study once which suggested that something like 3 percent of pirated copies represented actual lost sales (people that would buy the game if they had no option to pirate it). The same study suggested that most piracy represents a sort of unfettered trail-version for many pirates -- they'll pirate a game simply to try it, they may not even play it more than a couple times. Only very rarely are pirates actually enjoying the fruits of your labor Scot free for long periods of time.

TL;DR: You cannot really reduce piracy, you can only increase paying customers. The best way to do that is to provide the most compelling experience you can, while strongly incentivising them to pony up some bills. Don't worry about the revenue you've 'lost', build the revenue you can. You'll see a higher return on converting customers (including former pirates) than you will on thwarting the die-hard pirates.

You can't stop the pirates, period. You can slow them down, perhaps, but any measures you employ in this way will also potentially block and irritate your legitimate customers.

It depends on the demand for a cracked copy of the individual product. The latest AAA game will inevitably be cracked, but there's heaps of tiny non-popular games that cqn get away with simple defenses because no crackers are bothering to even look at them :)
The less popular your game is, the less sophisticated your defenses can be while still avoiding piracy.

One client that I work with had a very interesting approach - direct psychological warfare against the crackers.
These guys crack games to show off - they often don't want to even play the game themselves, but are just fulfilling a demand for a crack and getting the opportunity to slap their name/handle on it. Cracking games gives you reputation.
...so, this client went after their reputations. He hangs out in the hacking/cracking/cheating communities and pretends to be their peer. He encourages them to crack his own gamr (but they dont know its his game). He makes some of the DRM obvious, but some of it subtle and time-bombed, so that a naive cracker will think they've sucessfully crqcked the game after disarming the obvious bits.
They then post their cracks, anf the pirate torrents appear. The game's author then uses his fake-hacker sock-puppet accounts to demonstrate that the crack doesn't work (there's still some DRM code active) and publicly shames the cracker, damaging their reputation.
Repeat this a few times and all the good crackers gave up - a series of embarrassing not-quite-cracks made them just avoid that game completely.
There's currently no working pirated version of their game on the torrent sites - only the ones that work temporarily before the subtle DRM kicks in half way through thw first level.
Also, if you're connected to the internet, this delayed DRM check calls home to see what to do. Currently the DRM server sends back instructions to open the steam store URL where you can buy the full game :D

Good luck if they discover the ruse though, expect dick pics in all the email accounts you ever had.

You don't.

By making the game cheap and easy to buy, you'll net more profit than by putting efforts towards DRM.

Every indie I know that has turned up a profit has approached this problem with this mindset.

One client that I work with had a very interesting approach - direct psychological warfare against the crackers.

These guys crack games to show off - they often don't want to even play the game themselves, but are just fulfilling a demand for a crack and getting the opportunity to slap their name/handle on it. Cracking games gives you reputation.

Nice! But then, beating the game's DRM could be seen as a challenge, bringing extra rep. Reminds me of this article.