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It may help stave off blatant rip-offs for a while.

Of course, if you strike it big, someone will eventually find enough time with a debugger to get around it, but as a small indie dev you'll probably be most interested in making sure you can break even first.

Assets are protected by copyright. If you are not concerned about copyright you can just redistribute the whole game.

Thus preventing the users from being able to use the fair use rights from US copyright.

Everyone knows you can't prevent piracy/copycats forever, but it was likely built into whatever they built the game with, or wasn't too difficult to add.

Yes a determined person could still get to them but it helps buy you some time as your game launches.

Some frameworks do this by default to protect grafic assets from stealing. At least too easily.