Let’s say you download a game and can play it offline. In theory, everything you need is on your computer, right ? So how come people don’t just find everything, copy it and massively share (or sell for a lower price) folders with everything in ?
In: Technology
Former game developer here,
Software is written in source code. This is a human readable language. This language has a strict set of rules and mathematical properties, which is why source code doesn’t read like “when I push the button, attack the enemy”, that’s way too ambiguous for today’s language parsing algorithms.
So the source code, a text document, is fed as the input to a translator, which will transform the textual representation of the program into a sequence of machine instructions – a program. This process is irreversible. That is to say, you may have a variable, `hit_points`, that you keep track of whether the player is alive or dead. The name of the variable isn’t important to the machine, so that information is lost. Your variable might have a type, maybe a simple integer or some other representation. At the machine level, this information is lost – it’s all just bits.
So what the machine code sacrifices is context. You don’t know what the instructions were intent to do. And these transforms can be optimized – provided the translator can prove equivalence and correctness, variables and instructions may be removed entirely, or be completely reorganized and otherwise unrecognizable from the original human expression of intent. It takes a lot of work to look at machine code and deduce the context and intent.
So it’s not trivial. But of course there are crackers who do manage to figure out intellectual property protection mechanisms and disable them – releasing patches that change the program instructions to subvert them. To this community, this is the game – and they play it amongst other crackers who all rush to try to be the first.
Additional methods of protection include proprietary formats (security through obscurity) and encryption, even of the executable program itself.
It’s a lot of work to undo any of this. At best – and assuming you don’t get arrested or sued into oblivion for IP theft, you might be able to produce a nearly faithful reproduction or clone of the original. I think there’s a team trying to do this with an N64 Zelda classic, for example. But the effort, and their example is what I would expect, is greater than the cost of the original production. Not only do they have to write all new source code, not only do they have to produce all their own audio and visual assets, but they have to painstakingly reverse engineer the original in order to have some confidence that their reproduction is indeed faithful.
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