Yes may be it's only 10%, but when you are talking about 10% of 25 millions iPhone and nearly the same on iPod Touch it meens 5 Millions (advanced users) that can be potential buyers if they don't have the choice between hacked or paid apps. On some links where you find your game hacked , sometime you have number of versions downloaded on these link. It's really hard to see thousands of downloads for each.
Yep, Glen, I agree. I would only expect it to be something around 10% - 15% - however I think even that rise would be significant to many developers. I still don't believe it's something developers should spend a significant amount of time on though. Or even worrying about piracy at all for the app store. Just put in a message politely asking the cracker to purchase the app and leave it, there's not much else you can do.
I suspect a large percentage of the gaming population on iphone is pirating games. Ok, so only 10% of iDevices are jailbroken; what if the entire gaming market is only 20% of all iDevices? That would start to explain the statistics we're seeing.
Another factor that skews the numbers: pirates may get tons and tons of games, play each once (if at all) and then move on to the next stolen game. The question then isn’t just looking at total numbers of players or games, but at how MUCH people play each game. A game could have 75% of its users be pirates, yet the other 25% could be doing most of the actual playing. Or vice versa. A high score list is a good measure of that: when the dev sees most high scores are from pirates, then you know it’s serious players who are spending time with the game—who know they like it—yet won’t pay a few bucks for the hard work that went into it. That IS discouraging. And % of devices isn’t the same as % of games. What if 20% of iPhone users play games, but most of them only bought a game or two? Those people are less interesting to look at than the people who play lots of different games.
As a traditional handheld gamer (I own a DS Lite and PSP Slim), I find it not only idiotic but appalling that some feel the need to pirate App Store games. I mean, c'mon: these games range from $1 to $4 on average, with $4+ games going on (temporary) sale all the time. In fact, although I don't have an iPod touch yet, most of the games I've downloaded to iTunes have been great deals and total freebies of great games (e.g. like when I got Resident Evil 4 for like $2). It's pathetic. Some people are sooooo cheap! I've read it all, too: some say the economy's bad so they don't buy games; they try before they buy; and loads of other crap. It's ridiculous.
You can't get rid of piracy. You can mitigate it in many ways, but it will never...ever...stop. Unless you're losing big money, ignore it and get on with business. Consider it "Collateral Damage". And if you are losing big money, look for a business model that will protect you - don't waste time trying to think of magic solutions; people have been through these hoops countless times for decades. Regarding the OP: Statistics can be misleading. They require large samples and extra information to be remotely dependable. The Tap Fu sample is of 6 days, and there's no mention of how many units are involved; no reference point. He says his product is in the top 100, well that can be as low as 100 units. Would you be surprised if ten people or ninenty people pirated a game? Piracy always consists of a sharp peak for the first few days of availability. If he said 500 people per day were pirating his game, then...well, that'd be something else wouldn't it, if it continued every day for a month (as a 90% figure). The fact that he's talking about high score entries and not actual purchases makes it even less dependable, assuming that everyone that bought the game submitted a high score. Where are the iPod users without WiFi?
You don't know what you are talking about do you? Every device has a udid it has nothing to so with pirating.
He's talking about an app to change your udid and set it to whatever you want. Good thing is smart devs also use other random identifiers that you have no idea what it is.
Hello guys, Im currently writing an article regarding the AppStore piracy problem. I would like to talk to several developers to see, what experiences they have with piracy and if they see piracy as a problem or not. The article will be published on taptoplay.de. If you are interested in supporting me, please contact me using a pm or send a mail to lakeshore at taptoplay.de Thanks and bye, Oliver
It's really sad. The games/apps on the AppStore are really cheap. Everyone owning a few hundred dollars worth phone, can afford to buy some games/apps. Not everyone has the money to pay 50-60 USD for an Xbox/PS3/PC game, but 1-3 USD for iPhone apps/games...
Our game 'Pro Surfing (Wildcard)' was on all the pirate sites within 48 hours of going live on the app store. We implemented the usual digital rights management protection in the app which was picked out with ease by some guy referring to himself as the 'hexhammer' and it is now available on file sharing sites all over the internet. Does it worry me as a developer? sort of.. Does it give me a strange sense of satisfaction knowing the game has been embraced by the warez community? sort of.. I for one grew up in the days of the Apple II, C64, Amiga, PC and I can say of the thousands of games i have had in my posession I probably paid for less than 5% of them and this was usually when I found them in a bargain bin several years later. To make an excuse I was from a not so wealthy family and games were not as cheap as iPhone games are today but really it was just so common place and it was bred into me from a young age. (My father even used to belong to a crackers group on the Apple IIe) Of course these days I buy all my iPhone games but im not necessarily opposed to kids getting their iPhones or iPods jailbroken so they can get games for free. Sure it might cost us in sales but I personally think that the main purpose in making games is to entertain people and if kids want to jailbreak their phones, warez our games and enjoy playing them then to me thats an acceptable situation. On the other hand, for the adults with decent paying jobs and a sense of community and responsibility, id be a little less forgiving to find them stealing a game that costs less than a glass of beer.
hey, thats not that bad ! when we originally released Light Wars (geoFighter now) on May 27, we started soon looking for the pirated versions (out of pure curiosity). and we were pretty stunned when we found some russian site that provided our game with original post from May 23rd or 25th - BEFORE it actually appeared in the store
Wonder how that happened... Did they somehow get a hold of the binary after Apple approved it, but before you released it? Or, was the post date just off?
TractionGames, i was wondering, have you use iPhoneUtils.isApplicationGenuine to counter the piracy thing ? So it's still not enough to reduce the amount of pirate version ?? omg....
Maybe if this super awesome developer developed an App Store game that is soo great he'll release it only of piracy stopped. What a dumb idea...
thats specific to the Unity sdk. if you want to check it with objective-c: Code: NSAutoReleasePool *pool; boolean pirate_copy; // iphone: piracy detection pirate_copy = false; pool = [ [ NSAutoreleasePool alloc ] init ]; { if ([ [ [ NSBundle mainBundle ] infoDictionary ] objectForKey: @"SignerIdentity" ] != NULL) { // we have just detected a pirated copy pirate_copy = true; } } [ pool release ]; this simply checks the distributed Info.plist for the SignerIdentify attribute - which is removed when they build the cracked ipa file. pretty simple - but, what are you going to do once you detected a crack? we simply report it when submitting high scores - we have a big database of users who use games illegally - we'll probably block them from competitions we have in the future tho. if you have a server to sync data with; this is one thing you can do.
Just to clarify - If you use this to detect a crack and put up a fail screen - the cracker will patch it in 0.01 seconds. But its very useful for logging as mentioned or for stats that you can blog about
I agree. Legitimate customers should have to register online and then have a postcard mailed to their homes with a special code that can only be used once ...and the postcard should explode three minutes after you read it. That way only the pirates can download and play the game right away without any trouble. Another brilliant idea! We all know that suing consumers was how music piracy was finally defeated back in 2007! So that *has* to work! And I'm also sure that tracking down people would be really good for Apple's business because people aren't already worried about privacy. And no one would sue for invasion of privacy and harassment. So yeah, Apple is probably just waiting for more users to pirate things so that it can catch and alienate as many customers as possible. Any day now I'm sure...
