Fireside Chat: Unique Insights into Mobile Games Piracy (A Developer’s Guide)

i would like to welcome to uh the developer toolkit stage developer toolkit sponsored by danuvo for our first session which is unique insights into mobile games piracy uh for developers our first speakers of the afternoon um i've got christian coidle from urduto and uh samsa oxford from trap light i believe in here samsara and christian are you there ah here we go there we go can you uh can you hear me okay yes can you hear me great yeah absolutely yeah and you're coming through loud and clear so um we're a couple of minutes in you guys go ahead and do your session i'm going to fade into the background i'll keep my eye on the q a window don't feel you have to do that and uh you know monitor that unless you want

to i'll come back at the end and see how you're getting on um over to you guys cool thanks dave for the introduction and welcome everybody and thank you for joining in this session we're going to talk about the collaboration between trap light games and inuho on protecting the launch of trap light's latest game battle legion with me samsa from trap light games and i want to hand over to him for quickly introducing himself thank you christian so hello i'm samsa from triplet games uh i'm a senior programmer here uh i've been with the company for a little bit over six years now and i'm currently the lead client programmer on our latest title battle legion thanks for very great to be here and my name is christian coedel i'm leading the mobile protection project at de nuvo you might know the name dino from our leading pc anti-temper solution which we recently launched also for the mobile platform but let's get started with

talking about the game release i think one could say that um the big breakthrough for traplight games was the big bang racing game where you had a massive engaged builder community and now you're already creating a lot of bus around battle legion can you tell us a bit more about the concept behind the new game uh yeah sure so uh after big bang racing uh as a company we started to do a lot of different concepts and to look a little bit more further and uh and deep into this kind of tactical gameplay whereas big bang raising was uh about making these very split second decisions and uh while you are raising your car and and the user generated content so we wanted to make a little something a little bit more simple where the actual gameplay and the depth comes from the tactical aspect of the games so uh after a lot of different concepts one of our designers came up with uh with the concept of having your own

army and pitting against other people's armies where the gameplay would be this uh physics based with physics simulation having these uh very cool interactions and synergies between different units and then that became battle legion so what happened was that we actually managed to take all the tactical thing outside of the actual in-game gameplay and where you make your tactical decisions before the actual gameplay starts and then it becomes this kind of a spectator sport where you just watch the battle unfold and enjoy it and um what do you think what does it take in general to create a one of these chart-topping games in that stand out in this very competitive market um well our our philosophy is always that we we make our games perform as as well as possible so we take great pride that we our games have a great performance even on older devices and that comes just to the basic

gameplay and all the menus all the buttons that whenever a player clicks something they are very responsive and with battle legion we've developed it for for a couple of years now and our philosophy on that is that we do this data-driven development where we always measure different kpis and then change our like development based on that data so we make very small decisions and changes into the game and look at data if it's a good or a bad thing and i'm not going to go too deep into that but you can find actually a talk by our ceo about this subject from around a year ago how we can provide links later but that is something that we do and when it comes to these very uh chart-topping games i always think that it takes a little bit of luck so that you have the right game at the right time and for the right people for to be played with so

just a little bit of luck on top of that well now that we got to introduce our game uh like uh said before uh denobo is known known for these pc and console games as being the anti-cheap tool to to prevent hacking in there so uh christian can you tell a little bit like uh why why did daniel want to come to the mobile market also sure um i mean what we've seen is that the global market is uh growing very quickly and also many gamers and development studios are moving towards the mobile platform and mobile games but unfortunately also cheetahs and piracy does so what we've done is for example we've checked the play store top 50 games if there are any cheats available and there was a really surprising outcome given that we thought that especially this top 50 game developers will

invest considerable amount of effort into anti-cheating we thought that there are no basically will not be many cheats out there but the result was that out of this top 50 games 43 actually had at least one cheat available even more so definitely cheating is a big topic also on the mobile market and since we already have a pretty good solution available for pc it was just a logical next step to bring this knowledge to the mobile platform as well uh well can you elaborate a little bit more like some details like what what does it take to actually launch a mobile game with your protection on it like there's some testing and does it need some tailoring for for that specific game um so we have a we have some some integration process and the ease of integration is one of our main focus topics so it should be as simple as possible for game developers or

publishers and this integration starts with a setup phase on our site where we do static analysis of the application and we also profile the application to find spots parts of the application to protect which are on the one hand not performance critical and also at the same time provide good security and good quality for protection and after this whole setup is done we run the protection once and then we're playing the protected game for a couple of hours just to make sure that there is really absolutely no impact on the in-game experience to the game by fine-tuning these protection locations and this is what we call um the performance optimization optimization step um and all these initial steps that only need to be done once are done without any effort of the developer so that's all purely on our side um the outcome of all this is that we provide a utility

um to the developers which then takes care of uploading and downloading um to our protection services so it takes the unprotected application uploads it to our service the protection is then run completely automatic so no manual intervention required anymore and afterwards you get back the protected application it's as simple as this and developers are free to protect from that point on protect any application versions as often as they want [Music] then the utility that's i mean that's the only thing the clients really need to do to to take this utility and build it into the build pipeline and in most cases this is really plug and play there is only one special case and this is if you have a customized build process so going away from the standard toolkit then you need to integrate all these the the steps that are done by our tool um usually but we have guides for that

and you also get in-person support and actually this um this latter case was also the the case for uh trap date games so they were using a unity build with customized build process and uh so some so you can probably say something about um how this whole integration process went from your point of view and how it was working with the dinovo team yeah so uh from our end i think we got into talks early this year about uh collaborating and making this protection for for the game and it was way before we had a global launch the game and we didn't actually have any hackers back then at all in the game and we were just busy finishing the game and during that hurry uh i we also made the integration of the uh denobo toolkit diamond i think it in total the the things i had to do on on the are in our build process it took around like two or three days so it was very

fast and then then we had like the the issues that we ran into a lot of them were actually fixed on your and on even on the server so like we didn't need to pull new new files or or or scripts or anything it was just like just there like it just had to try again and everything worked and that was that was the uh most amazing part and the the support that i i got from you guys was was the top-notch experience that you don't get to experience that often when you are working with other developers or or like suppliers of different tools like like you answer the emails and everything in a matter of hours or or maximum of day so that was like pretty pretty amazing and just the the the things that you had to do were they're very amazing and i think it it told us to like three or four files in in your project

then then we have a custom build script system so that was around 20 lines of code or something to get everything work so like uh super easy considering how much it actually provides so i was very surprised about that well now that you've worked with us and you have worked with a lot of other publishers was there something specific that made you want to work with traplight and our team and with the game that we were developing thank you first for the very nice words about that the integration process and um i think yes and i think there are mainly two parts um first of all um from a company point of view um going uh having to deal with the nordic games market is super interesting because we know that it's a very lively exchange between the development studios and we hope that

good reputation spreads quickly and what you also have that other publishers often do not want to talk about being our customers or talking about having protection on the game in general or any kind of drm or something like this and um but with trap light game this was different so it was i think you're a partner who is very open and this allows us to do sessions like this one and to go out to the public and tell everybody what we're doing the game itself is interesting because it has a couple of different features which are worth protecting and which are interesting from a protection point of view i mean there are in-game purchases this is something that often gets hacked um it has a pvp component which of course also needs a lot of space for cheating and the like so we thought that our protection is actually really a good fit there and uh yeah we're not only serving for a single small purpose but

could use our whole bandwidth of protection techniques and secondly the other thing is that by coincidence i personally discovered battle legion in its beta phase i think that legion had really long beta phase before and i was playing battle legion already for a couple of weeks before we got into contact for the first time and of course if you are working with a game title that you like playing yourself this is always even more exciting than just having some random game not talking about that uh the protection um so battle legion was launched for ios and android as well but back then only our um android protection technology was done so we started with only protecting the android version while you release the ios version unprotected or without any other third-party security would you be open to share what the difference was in terms of of hacking on these both

platforms uh yeah certainly i don't have any hard numbers because we haven't actually gathered those and the protection tool doesn't report those as of now at least the version that we are using uh i know there is some development happening on that front also so looking forward to that but um we had an assumption because from from our experience with big bang raising that game was hacked on android in less than 24 hours so we had an assumption that our the most weak spot that we have is going to be there just because how the platform is like you have this all of these open source tools and you can install or uninstall anything from your device if you so choose so we knew that as a platform that was the most weak thing for us so we also wanted to focus on bringing the best maximum protection for that and with the genova toolkit i i think the first android hackers we saw

uh it took like a month before we saw the first ones and they were very minor so that was something that was very surprising for us that it took so long i was hoping that even like a few weeks might be like very great for the launch of the game and then it took even longer and there's already i know there are some improvements that we we have yet to implement into the game to make it more stable so i'm looking forward to that also but and on ios where we had some protections but those were not done by denver the game was uh hacked during the during the first week of launch which was uh like kind of expected that that something will happen in the first two weeks or something but what surprised me was that it was so like prominent that uh back in big bang racing i don't think the ios jailbreaking was that like kind of a common thing for people to do

and now it just blew up so there were hundreds of hackers or or so and we had to develop our own own things to actually catch those players and and uh it was very surprising i still because we had a lot of more players on android than on ios at the beginning so i was still thinking that just because of the sheer volume of players on android we would still get more hackers on there but uh i'm happy to be proven false on that matter also sorry for not having any real numbers about the hackers or the person touches or anything so oh yes and i'm also already excited about the releasing the ios protection and then also getting rid of the rest of them yeah yeah yes looking forward like uh it's going to be very good few months i i think i had so um well uh when when we met the protection one one of the like uh very

key things about was that there there are file size restrictions when it comes to games on these platforms google and apple and on google play store i think it's 100 megabytes that the game has to be under that size so that people can actually download it using their mobile data connection and that was like a key component for us and when we first implemented your tool uh i think it was like 20 megabytes or so over that size limit and then during a few months you improved your tool a lot to get us under that number and i know there's also like a constant development happening on that front uh can you elaborate a little bit like how hard is it to like reduce that size because obviously that has to happen a little bit when you're making these antidote bring tools and attaching them to a game yeah so this has been one of the biggest challenge from the beginning because um as already said our solution is based on

the technology of our pc anti-tampering and on pc it's not uncommon that we increase the file size by 10 times the file size of the original executable so adding hundreds of megabytes and as you said of course on the mobile platform that's not possible we have this especially in android we have this hard limit of 100 megabytes or 150 if you use the app bundles um but that's a limit for the for this base binary so we had it too we had to reduce this number of course a lot um to fit it into these requirements because not many are willing to you know apply this external downloading of resources and um and we are currently at about increasing the size by 10 of the original size which is already pretty fine and um and yes for the battle legion release um i can remember that uh just i think one or two weeks before the release there was we were really slightly below the uh the number but then there were a

couple of features added and so we we hit the number again so for the release specifically we squeezed out a couple more megabytes by removing everything that's really not absolutely required by the application so this is like a couple of special second sections from the binary for example um i mean it's pretty on the technical side then we applied better compression to the apk itself so it's still everything within limits and accepted by google play but it's just some better compression algorithm we restructured the data that we add to that application to make it actually better compressible because what counts is the compressed size of the apk file and uh so this was a couple of measures that we did last minute before the release and yes we know that we found there's still some room for a bit of improvement in the preparation of the application so we would select more precisely which parts we wanna we need to protect and which we need to expose for

our tools to protect which will bring a couple of more megabytes and this is something you could expect in the upcoming versions so i think then we should we are really at pretty much the bottom what is what is possible in terms of size increase without sacrificing too much security of course um um i know that in the beginning you had um you had a bit of concerns about adding additional security when it comes to like stability like performance cpu usage battery train and all these things that you usually pay attention to be very good at with your game and then every time you add something on top of course it's usually not to the good side so but can you share some impressions of the impact of our protection on the gameplay and all on all of the other stats like that like cpu usage and so on and in game performance like i said before we like we take great

pride in in having our games perform as well as possible so for us this was like this very very key component to to be working well so that if we add the protection the game has to run and perform well so i was very hesitant about adding these new new new tools on top of the game that was already like performing on the top notes and and some older devices we we were struggling already and drawing the line where we can put it then and then then after we made the first bills and you guys uh gave us the the first protected bills and we started testing i was i was like amazed that we had zero performance implications out of that so no no negative drops in in performance at all and especially our qa department is very has a very keen eye on that so uh

they they reported back to me that that everything is working smoothly and and i was amazed and uh super happy with it and especially since the protection also seemed to work and and like everything was good i i didn't expect it at all and when it comes to battery life our game already runs on the like takes everything out of your device and uses battery more than anything else sorry about that if you play the game and i think denobo is the smallest problem that people have on the device if they are trying to play our game so so the the the negative hits they they were uh zero to none like it's that i i didn't like experience anything so that was very cool and this is also what i tell in when we introduce our solution to uh potential customers but i think it's good for the audience to hear that also from uh from the developer side as well now too yeah definitely but yeah

um i think that pretty much covers what we have done with the battle legion and our game uh but can you still tell a little bit more about like uh because your company does this for and specializes on the topic uh how how important is it to have the two games be fair and and have these kind of protections in your games when when you launch them um as i said in the very beginning there is really a big number of cheats out there so it was 86 of the games that we have tested that have cheats and i think this number is greatly underestimated by um by developers and and publishers um so how do these cheats impact the success of the game i mean it's if it's a premium title so where you have to pay upfront or um there are cheats that circumvent in their purchases that's pretty clear it directly damages your revenue and the same goes for copycat games so if someone just takes your the complete code of your game and rebrands it and releases it under under its new name or on some other

stores the same thing also directly damages the revenue and in case the game has some pvp component like for patching legion for example there is also an additional aspect to that so gamers quickly become frustrated of course if they get cheated on and they will turn to other games because it's just not fun to play in a game where there are a lot of cheetahs and this shrinks the user base which is was i'm sure very hard earned and so and potentially could also damage the reputation of the whole company if you see that they are making games don't do anything for anti-cheat and so you often have a lot of cheaters um i think that's often a good for reputation um now given that the integration process is so simple and there are virtually no downsides to putting protection on your game i think in current times this is a must-have for pretty much every game um so i see we're already a couple of minutes over so maybe let's

keep this as the final words for this session and move over to the q a part um i see we already have a couple of questions in the um q a section um let's try to answer them until the time is really over yeah um so first one when choosing a developer to work with what are the key aspects the nuvo looks for um so the key we're not really choosing uh developers and kicking someone out what we can say is that the protection works better if uh the game is protected before the initial launch it's not impossible as for baton legion there were also demo beta versions out there and the protection is still working but it of course opens a couple of possibilities to crackers if they see the unprotected game first and they have the possibility to exchange parts of the game and basically that's it so it's only the prerequisites we have in terms of

technical prerequisites so this no other no other aspects we're looking for and so next one how important did working with a partner like the nouveau became with the new security rules in europe um not sure if that's uh uh for whom this question is some so maybe you want to say something to that sounds like a very tough question but i'll try to answer uh i wonder if this is about the gdpr uh related questions or or something else i let's probably try to answer it that way european security you can ask me later in discord if if this isn't the right right thing you were asking for but about gdpr i don't think this has that much to do with the european security thing uh preventing

hackers this is more about like preventing the hacking of the actual in-game gameplay and instead of like uh security breaches on on server side or or in our databases so those are not protected by identical uh the and the gdpr is a very serious thing and we we also take that into account but the the in-game protection doesn't take any any any action against that yeah so our basic protection works completely offline so no concerns in that direction we now recently launched the option to have telemetry data where you can message back hacking attempts and then you have some information but still this would not send any any sensitive data to our servers so i think no need to have concerns in this direction next question can you share any techniques or practices that small

developers can easily easily implement to defend against hacking attempts yes so there are there are easy techniques and super effective and i think most important one is you need to pull as much as possible on the server side if the whole game logic is running on the server side and you're only using the client as a display for a game there is not much room for hacking anymore so this blocks really most of the different hacking attempts i think that's that's the main advice i could give and for all of the rest you should apply some tool like like our nuvo mobile protection next question are there any challenges developers should be aware when integrating the new solution in their games i mean as said the the integration of our tools is more or less without any effort you don't need to do anything during their protection process we recently also released an anti-cheat

sdk which would prevent from from cheaters using memory editors like like cheat engine or game guardian this as the name suggests is some sdk so you would need to tell us which variables you want to protect like the score or the health of your player whatever else so this is something you could do during the protection process during the development process already but for the base product basically there is no um any anything required from your side um yes so that one's answered and then we have one last question is piracy a huge issue do you have any data you can share um piracy as we know it from the pc market i think is not that big issue on uh on mobile because many of the games are free to play in the first place so the traditional

piracy where you copy the game and pay it without playing without paying for the game does not exist very often if yes if you have some premium title then i think it's the same thing as for any other cheats as soon as as hackers are able to reverse engineer how your application is working and how you do the license checking they can simply release a new version without these checks and you can find this on the more or less known cracking sites and you see you see these downloads where they just patched out the licensing you could you could download an application without actually paying for it but in short this is a problem on pc and it's not so much of a problem on on the mobile market i'd say you very much i'm going to interject there at that point that was a great talk thank you very much christian and samsa uh perfect you've given us a really good insight there into uh into the the tools that you can use to

challenge this um christian i had no idea that 86 percent of games uh that you tested had a had a cheating problem that's that's a that's a stat that's going to haunt me i think that's that's interesting i also had no idea before that [Laughter] well look thank you very much guys obviously i'm going to give you a round of applause you won't be able to hear it from the audience because everyone's at home but i really appreciate that