the fact that kids these days can say the above with a straight face and look at you like "What, what did i say wrong?" is just sad. last time i checked, the rules of the world are that if you can't afford to buy crap, you aren't automatically entitled to steal it just because you want it. that's like me saying, i like your house, but you live there, so i'm going to kill you (i'm joking FBI) so i can have it.
You know what's infuriating, your sense of entitlement. It's simple; don't pay, don't play. Piracy could eventually kill the App Store, A big game developer may one day look at the store, see the piracy stats, and decide it isn't worth his time to invest in it. Do you know what you get out of it? No more games. Don't think it will happen? Think about how quickly the App Store has grown, it's brand new and extremely unpredictable, it can fall just as quick as it's been growing. Don't ruin it for everyone else.
You just said that you know what you do is not right. Isn't that enough reason for you to not do it? What exactly would it take to make you think you shouldn't do it then? Fear of a government fine? Fear of going to federal pound-you-in-the-@ss prison?
Absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement you have there. It's incredible that you would just walk into the developers forum and state "yes I steal your games, and it infuriates me that you think I should not be able to steal them"! Developers certainly have no right to claim any of your money for nothing, so in turn, what exactly gives you the right to use a copy of something they create without paying for it? I hope you never post in a normal game topic here, because we'll all know that you obtained your copy of the game illegally. And before anyone asks... yes, pirates pissed in my cornflakes.
+1 For years some users have been preaching "the price is too high!". Now we have an ecosystem where developers can charge 99c to a few $ and earn a living from creating games and apps. We're in a place where NO ONE should complain about the price of apps, yet some people still have the same attitude they always did and continue to pirate. What else can be done to turn this around? I don't think developers or Apple can do much more than they already have.
yes and no, i complain about the prices of many apps, well, ok, maybe not complain, but i don't agree with many of them. but instead of pirating, i choose to just not buy an app until its at a price i agree with. there are quite a few apps i really want, but know i won't get to enjoy for many months, maybe even a year, until they're at a price point i can agree with. which is kind of disappointing knowing that they were already pirated by some majority of the players months ago while i'm doing the 'right' thing and patiently waiting. i think its that restraint that most pirates are missing.
I know what you're saying, but keep in mind that even the most expensive games($9.99) are still less expensive than the cheapest DS games. They only seem expensive relative to other iPhone games.
This is absolutely correct. Furthermore, there's a theory going that the perceived value of iPhone apps is an emergent property of the pricing system Apple has designed for the app store. A great example is the $0.99 app phenomenon. If, for example, Apple had set the minimum app price at $2.99 instead of $0.99, everyone would be whining about $2.99 being "all I'll ever pay for an app". The app store pricing system is directly responsible for setting the price expectations of customers. But I digress...
true, but it IS a brilliant psychological price point. think how many millions of copies dungeon hunter would have sold if it had the benefit of both being an extremely good game (supposedly, not going to pay $7 to confirm) AND as cheap as a pop from some vending machine (0.99). the iphone has supposedly 20 million devices out from what i thought i heard this afternoon, NOT including itouch users... i think even die hard pirates would melt a little and say "damn, that game is worth my buck".
I reckon the last part would just slip past their mind. This is sort of proven by the pirate-buyer conversion rate. Thus end result of Appstore would be: 1) Pirates who pirates anything that costs a dime. 2) People who whines about price and only buys app at the cost of .99 cents. 3) Quality Devs start quiting the platform due to piracy and lack of earnings from .99 cents app. 4) Less quality apps. More rubbish in the Appstore.
Thanksthats the kind of thing Im bookmarking for a rainy day and maybe my second iPhone game Gotta finish the first one first
That's fine. It's up to the developer to make something you want, for a good price. It's up to you to choose to buy or not. Nothing wrong with that! Selling more units doesn't mean more revenue though. I have no issue with good titles costing a bit more, especially if they've been more expensive to produce. There's 3 groups of people: 1. Those who will ALWAYS pay money for software they want. 2. Those who MIGHT pay money for software they want. 3. Those who will NEVER pay money for software they want. If you have a good product at a decent price, then you don't have to worry about group 1 or 2. Under no circumstances should you ever care about group 3, because they're not potential customers.
In my experience there is another group of pirates: Those who will pay for it when they're unable to get it for free. I worked in the music industry for years. After Napster and P2P sharing emerged online, music sales immediately dropped, and only recently have they begun to rise again. It appears that before they were able to pirate it, all those people were happily paying for music. I believe if Apple introduced new DRM on Apps that made them extremely difficult to pirate, sales all across the app store would swell. I don't think all pirate copies being downloaded would translate into sales, but I do think it would be noticeable to the sales. And before anyone responds saying it's impossible to have uncrackable DRM, Apple have done it before. In-fact, twice that I know of: Logic Pro, which nobody has been able to successfully crack since 2003. Plus one of the last versions of the iTunes Fairplay DRM.
I just came across a great article about this. BTW, the anti-piracy group I started here at TA 2 days ago is now the third largest group in the community. There are a lot of us here who support you developers, and hope that piracy decreases significantly. http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/iPhone+news/feature.asp?c=16462
As a developer waiting for our first game to be approved, we are getting a lot of feature requests for future updates. Piracy will certainly destroy my motivation to take the game forward with added new content. I've been involved with the games industry for over twenty years and nothing really ever gets done to stop this from happening. Piracy is just an EVIL that will always be there...
On our side, we only have one game with no piracy : My Brute and it's related to the fact that you need to be connected to our server to play with your characters. When you are on a server you have plenty of possibilities to stop pirates. On all other games ... there is no way at all to avoid piracy. We added a lot of anti-piracy system. If somebody really wants your game.. somebody is going to break your protection. It was between a week to 1 hour... It's very frustrating to see your work available for free so quickly. After that you can fight against links containing your game for free but many website are hidden behind DMCA and never answer... We are crossing our finger to see a new protection from Apple. The question is how many time before new crack...
But how many pirates are there out there really? I'm guessing that it's under 10% of all of the devices out there. A small percentage and yet a huge number of the most active new-game-players out there. They are the most active because a) they are real iDevice geeks (they care enough to Jailbreak FFS) and b) they are getting the games for free. If I'm right and the number is around 10%, this swelling you envisage would only be by 10%.
