Hi y'all, I've heard many people mention protecting or encrypting your game's data for it's release to the general population and don't quite understand it. Is there a practical reason you would want to do this?

Thanks!

Publishers and license deals generally require some degree of protection, ranging from packaging up assets to full encryption. A dedicated attack can extract assets no matter what your do and most people understand this. The intention is to reduce casual resource extraction, piracy, and the rest.

Packaging is a good idea generally as many techniques reduce load time. Encryption less so.

One of our games uses encrypted game data along with some digital signature algorithm in order to prevent modding the game as it is an online service related game. It however doesn't prevent people from ripping your assets and cracking the game is also a usual practice, especially if you use a Unity built game

Awesome, that makes more sense now, thanks guys!

You got to protect yourself from hacker attacks. There are often hacks of gaming accounts, and players' computers are affected by network viruses.