[jokoon]

In tech, only ideas gets stolen. There are very few things that are really worth of being secret in software.

For games, hard work is just this: content (which has IP on it), debugging (which is specific to a certain game), handling GPUs (requires engineers, work is obsolete in 3 or 5 years), a few gameplay mechanics (cannot be patented).

Patents only matter when data is about some expensive, long term research that requires physical testing and labs, like a new molecule for a medicine, or some method or building a material.

Even when HL2 source code was stolen, it did not really matter.