Rip a $0.99 app is sad. Apple steals 30% from the developers and can't even control this. Multi billion dollar company vs home hackers, its just hilarious.
This Link shows an even higher rate of piracy than the 90% that started this thread which has got me thinking. This is all just a theory, a suggestion. Maybe, as developers we're looking at this all wrong, we're all understandably appalled that at least ten times as many people are downloading and running the pirate version but maybe what it's really illustrating is how hard it is to get noticed on the app store. I would suggest that a tiny proportion of iPod touches and iPhones are Jailbroken and not all of those are running pirate games. On quizzing my kids further it seems like every time a new OS is released a few more Jailbrakers give it up and go legit. Even though, in percentage terms, there are few Jailbroken pirates there are probably still a lot of people (hundreds of thousands?) actively downloading pirate apps. I don't know exactly how it all works but maybe thousands of people subscribe to some site and download a big zip of today's releases and play them once before deleting. If this is the case the day one exposure for a game among pirates is bound to be massively more than any game could achieve on the app store. Touch Arcade for example has got to be one of the most important places to get your game noticed but how many day one sales does it generate?, I suspect a few thousand at best. As far as I can make out no app is ever featured by Apple on day one. I'll bet that the number of Pirates running (and probably deleting) your app on day one is way more than the number of legit App Store users who even know your game exists. I'd like to see the piracy vs legit new user figures for a 2 week old game that just got featured on the app store, I suspect it would tell a different story. Word of mouth, chart position and (if you're lucky) featured status would all be taking effect while the pirates will all be looking through lists of whatever came out since yours. I could be completely wrong about all of this, it's all very easy to say while my first app is waiting for approval. I'll probably feel very differently about this when my game is out...
Yes because maintaining the App Store costs nothing, all the people who work in the app approval department work for free, and Apple has bartered a deal with credit card companies to offer an unprecedented zero percentage transaction rate right?
I'm not a developer, but I saw the thread title, and wanted to let you all know that many of us here support you, and I created a group to show everyone here that. Check my sig if you're interested.
I'm as against piracy as much as the next guy that sells software but I think the title is misleading. There is really no information here that says piracy is getting worse. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that on a percentage of user basis, the commodore 64 crowd had a higher rate of piracy. PS. Please don't steal my games!
the part that ticks me off (well, part one) is that they can so easily tell which app is pirated and that they don't/can't? do anything about it in the code. i mean if you can't due to some stupid apple rules, then that's one thing, but if you just DON'T, then quite frankly i don't care about your problems. the second thing that ticks me off is that here i am left waiting for 30 or so games to get to a price point i'm willing/able to pay for, and all these other frackjobs stole them, enjoyed them, and dumped them months ago in favor of other stolen games, months ago. the argument of "they wouldn't have bought them anyway" is just plain retarded. if you give them the option to take it for free, and offer no penalty for doing so, why wouldn't they?
Anyone check out the high score list? There are scores from China! That's proof that either games are being sold or maybe pirated in China! yaya +1 billion new consumers!!
Don't get me wrong - I was not offering my arguments as a justification for piracy. My point is that if you killed piracy overnight, I don't think you'd see a corresponding rise in sales. Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this because I'm a game dev myself with a game coming out soon. I agree with you: people who can afford the device are not 'poor'. If you have enough money for the device, but you still pirate games, you are pretty much a douchebag. However, I just think these "rich pirates" make up a small percentage of the total. My belief is that a large proportion of pirates are schoolkids or students who have no disposable income. They did not buy their device - someone else did (birthday present, for example). I have no hard data to back this belief up, unfortunately. If you or anyone else have data about this I'd really love to see it. You're right that many countries has app stores access now. However, it is a bit harder to get credit cards in many Asian/European countries. The recession has made things worse too. But once again, I'd really like to see some hard data about piracy numbers, where most pirates come from, socio-economic data etc...
I bet there are a lot of jailbroken people here who claim not to pirate apps but do anyway. I trust no one!!!
In it's heyday I can't imagine the C-64 having 90% piracy rate. That mean on average 1 guy buys it and makes 9 copies for his friends, but really what are the chances of that dude having 9 friends with C-64? The logistics just don't work out very well when u have to manually copy floppies and exchange it by hand, which slows the speed of piracy greatly. So some will have to buy it to get it in a reasonable amount of time.
Piracy is why, if/when I release my game project, it won’t have an online/community/multiplayer component. The servers for that would cost me money—and if pirates increase my server usage, they’ll make my costs balloon. iPhone development is new for me—an experiment I want to succeed. But I can’t throw tons of money away offering any kind of online services to pirates. I hope to work around that some day (maybe even an online component that fights piracy) but it’s not something I want to deal with as I get started. I want to develop my game and worry about things like graphics and user experience and, you know, fun
You can put code into your app that checks to see if the app contains a valid digital signature or not, and not if not then it's been pirated: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/04/anti-piracy-snippet.html You can then make some sort of popup saying that because it costs you money to run the servers, only people who buy the game from the App Store can use the online component, and give them a link to your game in the App Store. That way it's polite, and if the pirates really like your game and didn't just grab it cause it's free, there's a good chance you'll convert them to buyers. I haven't done this sort of thing yet myself, but I'm definitely considering some sort of nag screen that pops up if it's pirated and has been used a bunch of times asking the pirate to buy the game. Of course, the one game I have in the App Store doesn't seem to be pirated at all (not anywhere I've searched anyway).
Just keep in mind that due to the fact that it's easy for Pirates to aquire TONS of games whenever they come out, of course there will be way more pirates playing your games, especially at the start. You should know that although the pirates will never pay for games(anyone who says they will is crazy), it's possible that they'll still help to create buzz for your games. ex. One of their non-technical/legit friends might see them playing one of your games, and ask what it is, and decide to buy it. Otherwise just ignore them. They're not gonna pirate some games and buy others, so if your game isn't available for piracy, they're not gonna play it at all. That's why I wouldn't even bother making your game "pirate proof"(although having pirate specific messages/warnings is a decent idea).
i think that's wrong. that's like saying Ford/Toyota/GM (whoever) should be proud/happy that their particular car brand is stolen the most because it makes it look like a car everyone wants.
Those rates are for bussines software like Adobe Photoshop or 3D Max. Those are quite different for games. From the latest casual PC games which keep high score, the numbers are about 80-90% piracy on that platform. Piracy might have been rampant in the past, but with todays Internet, it's in a whole another league. In the past like I mentioned, a person had to physically copy and distribute the material and only to their friends. Today a person doesn't even need to do that, they can put it onto a 3rd party hosting site and literally 10,000 people can download it, this is orders magnitued easier than 20 years ago.
Well I just sent an email to Steve Jobs. I know, chances are close to zero that he ever will read it.. but if more of us do the same, maybe they'll think about this problem...
Yeah that's basically what I am saying, well, kind of. The difference is that when a car gets stolen, it creates a huge problem for the owners of the car, but piracy doesn't affect the legit buyers of your game at all. Pirates play LOTS of games, and they play them as soon as they're released. Almost all of the "extreme" piracy stats that I see(the ones in the 80%+ range) are from the first few days/weeks of launch. That's not an accurate time to get REAL piracy statistics. Over time, legitimate buyers will keep buying your game, but pirates won't keep pirating it, they'll have moved on to whatever the newest games are.
