This is scaring me shitless. I think I'll have to find some talented senior year student, drive him to my house and video record everything, every time.
How to protect yourself and your game?
This is the nature of contracting out your workloads for a, "confidential product" If you simply cannot trust anybody with the workload you plan to give them, than you simply need to learn how to do it yourself. You could always attempt to STIFF the workstation they are likely to use. I.e. disable USB ports, setup web-proxies, ect.
But even than, there is always a work around.
Even if you run a physical game studio where everyone comes into your office, people can steal your assets and go and publish them all on the internet... Even if you have proof that they've done this, then what?
As well as the damage that's been done by this leak, you've got to go and find a heap more money so you can hire a legal team and launch a lawsuit to try and prove in court that this person has damaged your business and that they should pay you compensation... That's a hassle.
If you hire internationally, it's the exact same problem -- you still have to sue a leaker to have them be held accountable --- but the legal issues are a bit more complicated. You can sue them in your country but may not be able to enforce the result... so you can instead sue them in their country, which may be quite a hassle.
In my experience with physical studios, the answer is: don't hire people who are going to break NDA, and fire anyone who does.
People don't want to ruin their entire career by becoming known as untrustworthy...
9 minutes ago, Armantium said:I think I'll have to find some talented senior year student...
No, you need to find a professional who's made a career of working for many companies and never fucking them over... which is 99.99% of professionals.
Any kind of business endeavor works like that. You implicitly depend on that all the people involved aren't insane. That it wont turn out that the "John Williams from DC" artist guy you contracted is actually Juan Carlos Lee, who lives in Mongolia taking care of sheeps, and has been selling what whatever he was making for you to multiple people at the same time behind your back for two years. Or that the sound effect gal you hired isn't actually just stealing other people's sounds and slightly tweaking them when you ask her to do so because they don't sound appropriate for your game.
Everything is a gamble. You can just make some efforts to make your fall softer if it comes to it.
Hiring in your country is likely the best idea and have them sign NDA's written by a local lawyer who is aware of federal laws in your country also. This would be my non-legal advise. Seek a lawyers assistance in the matter. It will be cheaper over time then finding out we may have given you poor information in an online forum.
There is only one way I know of protecting yourself after something has been stolen. Get a legal contract for every piece of work someone does for you.
Some Freelancing sites create contracts like this for the Freelancers and clients, a other way is using a email contract. For a email to be considered a contract both parties need to reside in a country where emails can be used as a contract and there must be a way to confirm the persons real identity using only the email account; for example gmail needs a mobile number and some countries require registration for a person to buy a sim card.
Most contracts require the exchange of money.
These contacts will work for removing stolen assets and games from app stores and asset websites, you just have to prove ownership and the contract works most of the time. Turbo squid for example removes models if you can prove someone uploaded it without you permission.
To prevent people from stealing in the first place a NDA is your best defence. A professional wouldn't break a NDA even if there is bad blood between you, doing so would make it impossible to get hired if word got around; it also allows you to then take legal action against them.
Unfortunately even if you do all you can people will steal from you, look at AAA games you can even illegally download there assets if you wanted. The only way to fully protect a game is to never make it.
I hired a lot of freelancers for some of my stuff and i protected myself dead simple.
If you're afraid someone will steal your art - give them a project (or a part of the project) with only placeholder art to work on, then copy the things they did to the original project.
If you're afraid someone will steal your code - give them as little as needed for them to work on it, a scene with placeholder art, basic functionality needed for them to have a grasp of the concept.
If you're afraid some will steal your idea - don't worry, they need to start working on the game from the beginning, and you're probably far off already.
But the best way is to precisely define what exactly do you need and have them to that only, without accessing your project. It may take a bit more time and be more expensive since you'll probably need to revise the work done a few times, but it's the ultimate in protecting yourself and your project.
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2 minutes ago, FatPugStudio said:But the best way is to precisely define what exactly do you need and have them to that only, without accessing your project. It may take a bit more time and be more expensive since you'll probably need to revise the work done a few times, but it's the ultimate in protecting yourself and your project.
Yes, you're right. It will require a lot of preparation and dissection, but it would be the safest, along with the NDA contract.
Don't waste your time with an NDA, strip the project so it contains enough for them to work on it and not enough for them to gain anything by stealing it.
This might not work in your particular context, but in terms of indie games I think it's worth asking what you gain from keeping everything under lock and key. Are your game ideas really so original and valuable that you'd take a monetary loss if anyone learned about them? Better yet - would you benefit from people knowing what you're working on? Both from the point of view that if it's publicly known that the ideas are yours it would be easier to defend them as such, but also, building hype is an important tool for indies who don't have the marketing power of an existing IP to bank on. Keeping an indie game as a strict secret seems counter-intuitive to me.
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