If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.
Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.
Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.
Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.
Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.
Wouldn’t capturing in high-res, then scaling down or compressing the picture/video defeat the noise filter? Or if you threw a bit of noise on it yourself?
Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.
If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it’s basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.
It’s an awesome field and nothing new.
