How much did Terraria get hurt by releasing non-obfuscated binaries at first, and then having hackers grab the source and release their own version? They are probably the main case I can think of for a C# game that was released without obfuscation and was popular enough that someone cared.

(Though as a counter-point, someone got annoyed with FTL's lack of moddability, and just recoded the whole thing from scratch and used the same art assets)

I'm kind of on the fence, doing a mild amount of work to give hackers a slightly tougher time might be worth the effort, it's hard to say.

Woho, I didn't hear about the Terraria thing. I'm Googling that.

Shouldn't there be a license like Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial included with the game?

[Added]

Well Terraria dev said "I didn't obfuscate it for a reason". I guess he wanted the community to mod his game, which is cool.

Code obfuscation is typically done when you release your game to the public. During the normal development time, you never want to obfuscate your code.

Which means that you have to get into habit handling multiple development environments (e.g. Release vs. Debug, development - alpha - beta - production). Your code has to cope with those differences in the env too. During development, you output as much as debugging info as possible, turn on fps, wireframe, collision boxes, etc. When you toggle your build to Release, all of that is turned off and obfuscation is turned on.

You still have to retest your game in Release mode as it's now a different binary. There could potentially bugs that arise only when you have it on Release mode.

Shouldn't there be a license like Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial included with the game?

It can be pretty hard to get hackers to obey licenses =)

Shouldn't there be a license like Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial included with the game?

It can be pretty hard to get hackers to obey licenses =)

hahaahahha LAMO. that made me laugh so hard. Hhahahahahahahah LMAO