Overview > What is GameShield?What is GameShield?
GameShield™ manages your game's distribution life-cycle. Whether you are deploying a single build of your game for both online and retail (brick-and-mortar) sales, or producing several versions with different licensing parameters and protection levels, GameShield provides you all the tools you need.
GameShield consists of several applications, tools, run-time components, and server components to help you best realize your business goals. Using GameShield you can set up Digital Rights Management the way you want to – applying premium protection, but still making it easy for your customers to purchase and play your game products.
GameShield License Management
GameShield has two key functions: it will manage for your game products: license management and enforcement, and protection.GameShield’s software license system allows you to create, edit, compile, test, distribute, activate and support licensed software. License enforcement is the mechanism by which the GameShield components may enforce specific license terms between your company (more specifically your application) and your customers (the end-users). GameShield supports time-based and usage-based Digital Rights Management, and combinations of the two. These can include:
- Time-based licenses: defined by minutes, hours, days or by a specified start/end date
- Usage-based licenses: defined by number of executions
- Feature-based* licenses: defined by pay-per-level, pay-per-item, micro-transactions
- Customized* licenses: create your own license model
*these models are achieved by combining GameShield's ClientProtector and IronWrap toolsets
Read more on GameShield's licensing and activation options:
GameShield’s Protection
GameShield protects your software with a variety of tools built to combat illegal cracking, tampering, and copying. One protection feature of GameShield is that it can be set up to check if the host machine is authorized to use the license every time your software starts (as well as checking that Activation Codes inputted are meant for the host machine). This "fingerprinting" ensures that even if a legitimate copy is unlocked and the entire hard drive is copied to another computer illegally - that the illegal copy would detect the attempt to use your license.
GameShield provides a variety of approaches to protect your product. The core approaches are:
- IronWrapping - GameShield's IronWrap is our wrapper technology. It is both powerful and flexible. It requires no changes to your source code. You can choose pre-defined license models or create your own customized model.
- Client Protector - GameShield's ClientProtector provides a COM DLL for customizable solutions.
- Combined Protection - GameShield's IronWrap and ClientProtector can be combined. IronWrapping your application and then accessing the ClientProtector from inside your application will provide a highly integrated User Interface (UI).
No other DRM system provides such a high-level of protection combined with the complete and total flexibility of an embedded-type solution. Read more on GameShield's protection options. For further details, visit the following GameShield product features: