quick question about an online arcade

[Taco]

would i be possible from mmf to create an online arcade where users purchase tokens and pay to play a game as they go along? they would first purchase the tokens then it would be a fixed number in the application?

[Asholay]

I guess so...

You'd need to have a server which contains each players data (name, password, number of tokens, etc), and you'd need to make sure it has good security throughout.

Then you'd need to, at the start of each arcade game, test the value which has tokens to make sure they have enough, then delete as appropriate when they play the game, while sending a message to the server to reduce their balance...

[Shawn]

Well, the server side wouldn't be so bad. The problem is I'd imagine it would be fairly easy to hack the client side so that you had unlimited tokens.

Online games work because most things are handled server side and they use good security. And since it is account based, they can ban accounts as they see fit. But that is if the game is primarily an online game. Any game with single player options can be hacked to play without some sort of authentication. That's the major problem facing game publishers and why they've tried (and failed) at various types of DRM.

To add to what was mentioned above, have the app check on start for the amount of tokens server side, if connection can't be established, then tokens is set to zero. Also, have it retrieve a security code of sorts from the server side to verify it's getting the token value from the actual server and not some hacked method.

Using a database online is the easy part. It's going to be the security measures that are going to be tough to figure out. You're going to have to implement a lot of checks to make sure the game is doing things legit. This is also going to require that the person running it has internet access. Online authentication is really about the only somewhat reliable method of DRM.