Commercial Development/Browser Game Concerns for MV

[+ CVincent 234]

Hey everyone.

 

Since the release of MV is approaching quickly I figured I'd dig into things to see just what kind of flaws there are for developing commercially with MV and what people should avoid/or be doing as best practices to keep their resources safe.

 

I've talked to a bunch of people in the community who have thought that their resources are easily kept safe from potential threats such as rippers who will take their resources and claim/use it as their own. Some people who have posted songs on Soundcloud but make it exclusive with no download link had no idea that their music could easily be stolen through a very simple method using Google Chrome's built-in features.

 

So you may be wondering how this all ties together.. Well, since browser based games in MV stream resources in you are actually getting all of the data as if it were regular files. It's not encrypted and you can easily download resources straight from your browser.

 

My concern is mostly that people who make games commercially may either embrace or ignore the usage of browser-based RPGs and focus primarily on the mobile market. If it's so easy to steal content then it may in fact be really difficult for people to reliably keep demos of their game safe from people who want to use their resources without permission.

 

So there are a lot of issues that I would assume not many people would have looked into which is why I made this post to keep people aware. Your content is never safe, even if you encrypt it. You will need to actively protect your work and make sure that you take action if someone is using your content without your permission. Commercial developers should probably not host their ENTIRE game on a browser page and instead perhaps allow customers to download the game using a code or something like that.

 

Aside from that you could really do some cool things to get people interested in your commercial projects if you have your own website. I personally would only release full games in browsers if they were non-commercial.

 

Be aware of what you're doing when you develop a game using MV and have custom resources you want to keep for yourself. If you thought it was easy for people to rip resources from games before, imagine how much more easy it will be now.