NDAs being broken is a huge concern for game developers nowadays as its getting easier and easier to share content with others around the world. We recently covered how EA handled Anthem’a Alpha NDA being broken by a Streamer, which led to the streamer’s whole Origin game library being deleted.
A developer who worked on the Xbox 360’s dashboard recently revealed the way Microsoft tracked NDA breakers during the last console generation.
The NXE Dashboard that replaced the Xbox 360’s Blade UI had rings in the bottom right corner surrounding the Xbox logo. Cullen helped embed the Xbox 360’s Serial Numbers in these rings so it could help Microsoft find out who exactly broke the NDA and take immediate action.
One of the most fun jobs I ever had was figuring out how to embed the serial number of your Xbox 360 into rings emanating from the bottom right, so we could track and identify leaks pic.twitter.com/i8knGgMTvz
— Cullen (@cullend) December 9, 2018
Do note this was for internal use only and didn’t make it to the public release of the Xbox 360 Dashboard.
It was only on NDA’d beta versions
— Cullen (@cullend) December 9, 2018
The developer further revealed how they did this for anyone who wants to incorporate in their own programs or software.
6 bit serial number, three ring widths and multiple groupings representing different bits 🙂
Take the screenshot/ picture, map to the cypher and you’d get your serial number
— Cullen (@cullend) December 10, 2018
This is so smart.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
