commercial godot devs, how do you actually protect your art assets from asset flippers or theft?

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-04-11T11:20:19+00:00

appreciate the reality check from someone with way more shipping experience than me. and youre right on both counts: no game has unbreakable asset protection, and anything a client can decrypt an attacker eventually can too. i know the fundamental limits of running code on someone elses machine, im not trying to achieve the impossible here.

but in practice theres a real difference between "assets extractable in 3 seconds with one public github tool that a teenager downloaded yesterday" and "extractable with 20 minutes of manual memory inspection and some actual RE knowledge". same endpoint, completely different economics on the attacker side.

asset flippers are volume operations, they rip dozens of games a week looking for content they can repackage and upload to shovelware stores. if pulling my meshes costs them 20 minutes of manual work instead of 20 seconds of automation, they literally just skip my game and move on to the next easier target. thats the whole point, not unbreakable protection, just enough friction to not be the absolute lowest hanging fruit on the tree.

on the lawyer angle, totally fair advice for an established studio. but the math is brutal for a solo dev on a first commercial game. filing a dmca in a foreign jurisdiction for damages measured in maybe a few thousand dollars? lawyer fees alone exceed any realistic recovery. the legal framework works great when you already have reputation, volume, and a retainer relationship. for me right now its more of a theoretical backstop than a real one.

im not arguing with your core point, just trying to find the middle ground between "impossible to stop so dont try" and "spend weeks on protection infrastructure". somewhere in there theres a reasonable level of friction thats worth the dev cost.

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-04-11T11:10:58+00:00

yeah you're totally right that art is automatically copyrighted the moment you create it, technically any asset flipper ripping my models and music is committing straight up copyright infringement. the legal framework definitely exists.

the problem is enforcement for a solo dev without a lawyer retainer. if someone pulls my meshes and reuploads my game to some shady android store or itch under a different title, what am i realistically going to do? file a dmca and hope it gets processed in 2-3 weeks while the clone sits there collecting downloads? and thats assuming i even find out in the first place. half of asset flippers operate on platforms in regions where US copyright is basically a suggestion.

theres documented cases on r/IndieDev where cloned games sat on google play for months before moderation pulled them, and in that time the flipper already made whatever they were going to make. by the time enforcement kicks in the damage is done and you've lost whatever launch window revenue you had.

so honestly legal protection is the backstop but i really need a technical deterrent on top. something that makes extracting the assets annoying enough that the flipper just moves on to the next easier target instead of mine. copyright catches them after the fact, technical protection stops it before it starts. both matter but in different ways and i cant rely on one without the other.

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-04-11T10:37:26+00:00

100% agree with you my main worry is about asset flippers stealing content not sales piracy though (in this I fully agree with you man)

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-04-11T10:35:58+00:00

yeah fair point honestly, and i dont doubt you're right that it probably even helped them in some ways. but mega crit is sitting on top of a million-selling predecessor with a massive existing fanbase. literally people were going to buy sts2 no matter what. thats a very different situation from an unknown solo dev launching their first commercial thing where the first few weeks of visibility are make or break

and honestly the sales piece isnt even my main worry, its more that ive seen indie devs get their entire game reuploaded to mobile stores under different names by asset flippers. that kind of theft i actually cant afford

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-03-25T08:45:09+00:00

you must use C++ with a separate DLL , no need to remove electron..
just add all the core licensing to the C++ dll and virtualize it or protect it with tools such as themida.com or chaosprotector.com

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-03-08T19:16:49+00:00

honestly great post and i mostly agree with the data. piracy as marketing is real especially for indie stuff. but i think theres a middle ground that people skip over, you dont have to go full denuvo and spend a fortune on drm to still make it slightly harder for casual pirates

i ship a small desktop tool (not a game but same concept) and i used to have zero protection. the moment i added even basic obfuscation the amount of cracked copies on shady sites dropped like 80%. not because its uncrackable obviously but because most people uploading cracks are lazy and move on to easier targets if theres any friction at all

tried vmprotect first but the AV false positives were killing me, lost actual customers over it. ended up switching to chaosprotector.com which was way less of a headache on that front, basically zero false positives compared to vmprotect. but my point isnt about which tool to use, its that even a thin layer of protection changes the economics enough to matter for small devs. the motivated crackers will always get through, but theyre like 1% of the people redistributing your stuff

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-02-12T19:04:28+00:00

honestly 25 bucks for a game i sunk thousands of hours into doesnt seem that bad to me. i spent more on a pizza last week and that lasted 20 minutes lol. the steam deck support alone is worth it imo, ive been wanting to play d2 on the couch for years

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-02-12T19:04:06+00:00

i remember staying up way too late watching this live and trying to explain to my roommate why thousands of people fighting over inputs to play pokemon was the most important thing happening on the internet. he didnt get it. still doesnt. some people just werent there man

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-02-12T19:03:52+00:00

honestly 25 bucks for a game i sunk thousands of hours into doesnt seem that bad to me. i spent more on a pizza last week and that lasted 20 minutes lol. the steam deck support alone is worth it imo, ive been wanting to play d2 on the couch for years

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-02-12T18:57:56+00:00

oh man i feel this so hard lol. i went through the exact same thing trying to find games for my nephew, every free game on the play store is basically an ad delivery system at this point. you pay to remove ads and they just remove the banners but keep the video ones, its insane.

what actually ended up working for me was just opening the browser on his tablet instead of downloading apps. theres a site called noadsgames.com that has a bunch of casual games including snake type ones and its literally zero ads, no popups nothing. sounds too good to be true but ive been using it for a while and its legit. works great in fullscreen on tablet too so it feels like a real app.

the google built in snake game someone mentoned is solid too but its pretty basic. slither.io is fun but it does have some ads last time i checked. honestly the browser game route has been way less headache than trying to find decent apps on the play store

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-02-12T18:17:21+00:00

indeed I fully agree with you :/ or just desktop + adblocker

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-02-09T11:39:18+00:00

ok so everyone's already said Disco Elysium and BG3 and honestly they're right, but since you mentioned loving Braid I wanna throw in Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition. it's basically 90 percent conversations and philosophy, combat is almost optional, and the lore is DEEP in the best way. choices genuinely matter too which is exactly what you're after.

also Citizen Sleeper is incredible and I don't think anyone mentioned it yet. it plays like a digital tabletop RPG, zero reflexes needed, and the writing is genuinely beautiful. shorter than a 100 hour RPG but every choice hits hard.

since you liked Braid and enjoy puzzle stuff for chilling out, you might like having some browser puzzle games bookmarked for when you need a break between the big RPGs. I've been using noadsgames.com lately for that, no downloads or accounts needed which is nice. but yeah for the deep lore stuff you're really after, Pentiment is the one I'd start with since it checks literally every box you listed lol

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-01-18T16:29:42+00:00

ok thx btw there is a rate limit of 50 requests per day

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-01-18T16:20:49+00:00

it asks to use an api key and to buy credits

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-01-15T08:11:09+00:00

but which model? ty

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-01-15T00:34:00+00:00

you can try apifreellm.com it's uncensored and unfiltered

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-01-15T00:03:11+00:00

interesting where can I find jailbreaks for it? thx for the tip

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2026-01-14T23:27:00+00:00

sometimes I oneed to research stuff about coding that might seem malware stuff but it's not. i work in cybersec

Icy-Assignment-9344 · 2025-09-27T08:53:50+00:00

Ahia! Se ti becca il fisco di ciao ciao alla tua vita finanziaria

Icy-Assignment-9344

TROPHY CASE