Notification when asset is used in someone else's game

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to control where one’s assets are being used.

When maps, guis, models, etc. are stolen and distributed to a wide audience of buyers it can devalue your game and quickly spiral out of control because (as far as I know) there is no way to reliably track down stolen copies.

Also, incomplete stolen copies that are exposed to a general audience early can lead to a situation where, when the original creator wants to launch their game, they get accused of stealing their own work, or the game’s reputation has been tarnished by the better-known lower quality copies. Another facet of the problem is the toll it can take on the creator’s mental health if they become aware of what’s going on without any counter-measure available. My proposed solution (two paragraphs below this one) would by no means be perfect, but it could give developers peace of mind.

If this issue was addressed, it would improve the development experience because creators could have more control over where their work is used and possibly prevent the situations listed above.

The proposed solution I have in mind is letting creators set up a notification system on a specific asset. For example, if someone made a decal, they could go to its configuration page and check a box saying “Notify me when this asset is used in another person’s game”. Then, if the asset is loaded into a live server, the creator would get a message telling which asset was used and the ID of the place that used it. With this information, the creator could file a support ticket or use a DMCA takedown at their discretion.

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#2

This might work for decals or meshes which are obtained by their ID from the site. But your post mentions maps, UIs and models. How do you propose these are detected?

UIs (assuming images are replaced) and in-game building does not have an ID attached to them. There are also infinitely many ways to configure the same in-game asset, and many values (like positions and rotations) are too fuzzy to match for exactly.

And of course, we wouldn’t want people trying to file claims on super simple assets like a white square.

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#3

This would only be for assets that have an ID and are loaded into a game that is already running, but even for, let’s say, a map that wouldn’t otherwise have any of these assets, the developer could sneak in a hidden decal that wouldn’t be observable through normal means to trigger the system. Granted, if all of the ID based instances are cleaned out then it wouldn’t protect the larger work, which would be an inherent weakness in that use case.

With the white square example, the idea here is just to relay information back to the creator. The other party may be using the asset legitimately. So a notification from this system would not necessarily imply any wrongdoing, and it would be up to the creator to decide what action to take, if any.

2 Likes