There is a significant amount of money at stake, so it's safe to say they are knowledgeable about their actions.
Actually, it's not quite effective. This measure is essentially futile when it comes to preventing plagiarism from JavaScript developers. It only adds about 30 seconds to the process of accessing the de-obfuscated code. For example, if I were to visit http://jsFiddle.net or http://jsbin.com and input the following code into the JavaScript box:
var txt = "textContent" in document.body ? "textContent" : "innerText",
eval = function (s) { document.body[txt] = s; }
Then, I could simply copy and paste the code from that site into the fiddle and run it. This would display all the code on the page, allowing me to copy and paste it into . There are various other methods to extract the code as well. One could easily copy and paste the string into any developer tools console window to get the desired output.
While obfuscation serves a purpose, implementing an additional layer using eval
seems amateurish and signifies a desperate attempt to conceal their valuable source code. This practice does not demonstrate expertise on their part.