Real Racing 3 shutting down
Hello guys! Relatively new on the forum. I’m just shooting my shot on the forum which maybe interested in a preservation act. HEADS UP! Im really not a programming or IT professional or anything, but I love Matt’s videos, that is what led me here.

So the thing is, today it was announced by the Slingshot devs (an EA studio) that Real Racing 3 is shutting down. It is already removed from both app stores but the servers are still running until March 19 2026 and if you obtain the apk on android you can still download all the assets of the game untill then. I was wondering if there is a way to do what happened with Sonic Runners. Can we collect maybe server packet or something? As I said I’m no technical expert, but can someone help me how or where to start? I have a Rooted android device, but basically that is all my starting point.

As it is an EA studio I’m not counting on server files to be open sourced.

I did some Research, and got a little help from fhe unofficial RR3 subreddit: the games engine is an inhouse engine called Mint3D developed by Firemint before they got bought out by EA. Also I dumped all of the games 8,5 GB worth of assets to my pc to have a look at the files. But that is the easier part, I don’t know how to capture server packets. I know the basics of “do thing ingame that need the server” but don’t know how to see what the game client communicating with the server. Can anyone help, or point me to the right direction where to search for tools maybe? It would really help!

If it's HTTP(S) you should be able to use any kind of packet dumping tool available on Google Play. It will run as a local VPN and you should be able to dump requests that come from the app. If the protocol is lower level you'd probably want to use Wireshark to dump traffic data. You can connect your phone to an access point hosted on your computer that Wireshark can intercept data from, or it might be easier to use some Android emulator on the computer.

I've done reverse engineering work in the past on games with online functionality (e.g. 1, 2), but they've usually been older and smaller ones where the traffic is unencrypted and could easily be dumped and inspected. Or reimplemented by looking at the client. So I can't explain all the steps in detail for doing it to a modern game, but when you're dumping encrypted traffic you will be basically doing a man-in-the-middle attack on yourself. Which is not too bad as you of course can trust yourself and can install the certificate that you will be using to decrypt and reencrypt traffic, but if the app in question does additional checks for the integrity of the server (e.g. pinning a specific certificate it knows the real server will use) that would probably cause some issues that will interfere with your ability to use the app to dump the necessary data. You would need to crack open the game client to be more lenient in that case.

Damn that is very good intel, thank you very much! We have a discord currently (finally), I’ve shared this with the guys over there. I will try both method. Again, thank you for the info!