Leonardo Giovanni Scur on Nostr: nprofile1q…8slxn Quick correction, binary is not chosen as a protection, it adds no ...
nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqxlm22dggfnnfutmhlm5psyyfc6rvneyjmpaswnumqytfgm639j8q78slxn (nprofile…slxn)
Quick correction, binary is not chosen as a protection, it adds no more security to the save file than a text file would. It just is more convenient to write than having to write a parser for a complicated object format, if you don't have one lying around already.
With that out of the way, your restated question makes more sense. The answer is there are no technical reasons to do that.
As cybersecurity people like to say, if the attacker controls the device you already lost the game. In a singleplayer game where the save is created by the user's computer (e.g. normal offline game situation), the computer controls the contents of the save and the player owns the computer, so they control the contents of the save.
So any choice to make the save file less accessible to the player is a game design and business scope choice.
For example, why doesn't Dark Souls have a difficulty slider? Because the game design is all about perseverance and paying attention to things, allowing changing difficulty would change the game design.
Why don't games all have modding support and release development tools? Because it can be more time consuming to make a clearly moddable game, and might come with game design concessions.
So trying to obscure (not protect, as mentioned above) access to the save file is a choice to make the player less likely to be compelled to modify it. Why, who knows!
Maybe it's a "I know better" ego trip;
Maybe it's a way of not being lazy "ok if the player will quit before save editing, then the game needs to be good enough they don't wish to save edit";
Maybe it's just cargo cult;
Maybe it's a customer support fence "you went out of your way to fuck with the save, not my problem the game now crashes"
But none of these are reasons endorse obscuring a save only, there are other approaches that could have been taken to satisfy them.
Quick correction, binary is not chosen as a protection, it adds no more security to the save file than a text file would. It just is more convenient to write than having to write a parser for a complicated object format, if you don't have one lying around already.
With that out of the way, your restated question makes more sense. The answer is there are no technical reasons to do that.
As cybersecurity people like to say, if the attacker controls the device you already lost the game. In a singleplayer game where the save is created by the user's computer (e.g. normal offline game situation), the computer controls the contents of the save and the player owns the computer, so they control the contents of the save.
So any choice to make the save file less accessible to the player is a game design and business scope choice.
For example, why doesn't Dark Souls have a difficulty slider? Because the game design is all about perseverance and paying attention to things, allowing changing difficulty would change the game design.
Why don't games all have modding support and release development tools? Because it can be more time consuming to make a clearly moddable game, and might come with game design concessions.
So trying to obscure (not protect, as mentioned above) access to the save file is a choice to make the player less likely to be compelled to modify it. Why, who knows!
Maybe it's a "I know better" ego trip;
Maybe it's a way of not being lazy "ok if the player will quit before save editing, then the game needs to be good enough they don't wish to save edit";
Maybe it's just cargo cult;
Maybe it's a customer support fence "you went out of your way to fuck with the save, not my problem the game now crashes"
But none of these are reasons endorse obscuring a save only, there are other approaches that could have been taken to satisfy them.