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App Store Developer Speaks Out On Game Piracy
theguythatwrotethisthing sends in a write-up of his experience releasing an iPhone game on the App Store. By using a software flag to distinguish between high scores submitted by pirates and those submitted by users who purchased the game, the piracy rate is estimated at around 80% during the first week after release. Since a common excuse for piracy is "try before you buy," they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did.
Harrr!
But seriously, I think the app store really needs to give you a trial period before you have to pay for apps. So many of the programs out there are crap, I'm not willing to pay for 5 programs just to find one that does what I want.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Back in my day we were happy to plug in our Atari 2600 and slap in our favourite Space Invaders cartridge. We didn't need no "App store," what is that anyway, some place to buy appetizers? Oh I know, there's an app for that, god damnit Bobby Joe.
Could developers just release an ad-supported version for pirates to download? LIke on that Cydia store or something? I'm not too familiar with the whole submission process, but that should recover some income...
It seems strange to me considering the pricing and how much more convenient it is (at least IMO) to just use the App store. In fact, all the apps I've got on my iPhone are from the App store and were either free there or I paid for them.
That's not to say I'm fervently anti-piracy, I'll admit that I've downloaded a fair amount of movies, music and software in my life but it's almost always been because it was too expensive, not yet released where I live or simply much more convenient to do so.
As an example, a piece large expensive "professional" software that I want to use at home for fun or some minor non-commercial purpose isn't something I'm about to pony up $300 or whatever it costs for (I try to use open source when there is a good alternative), I've also downloaded games simply because I wasn't willing to pay full price to play it once for a few hours with a friend or two and then never play again. As for music and movies it tends to be a combination of pricing ($20 for an album I've never heard that probably only has a handful of good songs?), convenience (DRM) and it simply not being available where I live yet (woohoo, ordering Region 1 DVDs from the US). But a $4 iPhone game that can be downloaded in a minute at the click of a button? That seems pointless to me...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
How exactly do you set a software flag to determine whether it's pirated or not?
One interesting note is that the most pirate scores are submitted for Story level, then Rounds, then survival. This is the same order that the game types show up in our menus. This may point out that Pirates generally have a lower attention span – they quickly move on to the next game.
There's a really good reason why pirated scores are submitted in that order, and I would tell you, but there's a shiny red ball outside and I gotta catch it.
BRB
have they ruled out the reason why they haven't sold any to those pirates is because...they aren't really pirates but people who despise the App Store and it's restrictions?
Of course, due to the terms and conditions that the developer signed with Apple, they can't release it on Cydia as a pay-ware.
(if it was good and if it was on Cydia for a reasonable price, I have no problems opening up my wallet)
Without knowing exactly how this so called "Pirate Flag" works we cannot say that it is recording correct data. Frankly an 80% piracy rate seems a little difficult to believe given how most iPhone users I know use their phones (most use stock firmware, since they're still on warranty, and people have spent up to £800 and don't want to 'brick' it).
Most iPhones owners are happy to use the App' Store and iTunes. That is one of the reasons they purchased the device, to give them access to a huge array of high quality applications.
If I were this developer, I would display ads to the pirates, be it within the game or on an HTML formatted score board. This would hopefully recoup some of the lost money, and would keep everybody happy. I would be interested in their take on the idea.
Sig: I stole this sig.
By using a software flag to distinguish between high scores submitted by pirates and those submitted by users who purchased the game, the piracy rate is estimated at around 80%
so, all this informal study shows is 80% of REVIEWS are provided by pirates. There could be plenty who decide never to rate the game, and of course the ratio of rated vs unrated in each of these two categories is not tracked nor is it mentioned.
let's turn this on it's head, shall we?
The higher the piracy rate of your game, the greater word-of-mouth you will receive, so if you like market exposure, slap a weak DRM scheme on it, make it good, and claim it's "unpiratable", then let the money roll in.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
When I did pirate back in the day it was mostly because i simply couldnt afford the things i wanted. Now that I CAN afford to buy the software i need, i NEVER pirate. Those that pirate are rarely going to pay, those that dont pirate usually will pay. Pretty simple really. For me personally,I cant tell you how freakin giddy i was the other day when i bought an mp3 off amazon the other day for $.79. I selected, purchased and downloaded it in the time it took to install itunes so i could do the same thing.
Good-bye
The mighty ships o' th' honest swashbucklers be havin' sunk due t' encumberance.
Unfortunately the usual places carry the lot. One conspiracy theory goes that as Google at heart are an advertising company, rather than play DRM/lockdown why not "encourage" authors to give away apps funded by ads - in which case what does piracy matter?
You 're going to get a huge amount of publicity for your new game by having your article posted on Slashdot.
It seems I misread the meaning of "high scores"
I stil think my point stands, but.. nothing to see here, move along.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I work in a communications squadron, and I know at least 15 people with iPhones ---- I only know of one of them that has jailbroken his phone, and that was specifically for the purpose of switching carriers. So.... is my sample unusual because of a higher-than-normal standard of integrity (military personnel)? I mean... these are comm geeks; jailbreaking a phone would be trivial.
I am the iPhone developer for the Notifications app (see http://www.appnotifications.com/). On the first day my app was published on appulous (that happened very quickly after my app was on the appstore), the piracy rate was 99.3%. On that 99.3% I had about 1% who bought the application after trying it.
That was in the beginning of September, I now have a total piracy rate of about 50%. My app requires network and connects on my server, therefor my stats are pretty accurate. I think the piracy rate would be way higher than 50% if my app did not have to connect to my server.
http://blog.penso.info
I must admit that prior to the days when I had money to throw away on games as I saw fit I truly did pirate a game now and then for the sake of a trial period. I found it effective, but mainly in convincing me not to buy the game. And see, there is this unexpected factor I discovered, actually only recently, that severely impacts this chain of actions...
Basically it amounts to this: I find, all too often, that many games are not worth playing beyond the amount you normally get in a demo! I have downloaded so many demo games, especially racing or fighting games, on the PlayStation Network or XBOX Live and found that... well that was enough. To spend $60 more dollars simply to add a few levels and get the same experience was not a valuable prospect for me.
I won't try to claim that any significant portion of these piracy observations can be explained by what I'm describing. I would say it's not without merit though. In these days, there are so many games. I mean, honestly, I think there are more games released in a year than I could humanly play through in their entirety. Even filtering out the disinteresting games I would still never have the time, given work and other responsibilities, to finish anywhere near say, 10% of the releases in a year.
So to go from trial period to purchase, especially on a game that's likely a shallow me-too on the iPhone... well let's demonstrate the thought process with another nugget: I have downloaded probably 25 different "Light" games and never even tried them before I deleted them because I simply lost all interest.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
if only 100 people bought it, it's not really enought o pass judement is it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
the piracy rate is estimated at around 80% during the first week after release. Since a common excuse for piracy is "try before you buy," they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did.
Interesting answers to irrelevant questions.
Here's the money question: How many sales were displaced?
Suppose we want that information: Can you think of a test which would detect displaced sales?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I think most people here are missing the point about why there are so many pirates.
As a non-jail broken iPhone owner, I'd say 80% of the apps I get on the iTunes store are free. Sure I've paid a few bucks here and there for things I'll use a lot, but given I'm going to get bored of whatever game it is in 2-seconds flat, I can't even justify the few dollars. In this case, I wouldn't buy the game that is used in this example.
But make it free, and now there's no reason NOT to download it.
Whats the game. I'd like to know what the cost is and how good the game is. If its inexpensive for what the game is then there is no reason to pirate it. Cost does have alot to do with why people pirate things. Im not saying thats its right. I have bought a few games and wish that i hand pirated them as they were so bad. Is there a way to get a refund on the app store if you dont like a game/app ?
If you slash the price of the game in half in a few months and re-advertise it (like Steam has been doing with their weekly sales), then you will see another jump in sales. If you cut it down to 1/4, you will get even more sales. Some people think $4 is a good price, but others won't pay more than $2, and still some will wait for the $1 or $0.50 sale.
Each step allows you to reel in more buyers, because everybody has their own price threshold.
Games depreciate in value quickly--that's just how it is. Eventually the game won't be worth anything to anyone. Then you should give it out for free, along with a big fat advertisement for your next game. You ARE working on the next game, right?
Some people wouldn't pay a cent for the game in the first place, and they are the real pirates. You can't negotiate with them, so don't even bother. It's wasted development time to fight them. Even if you somehow make your game unpirate-able, they will just ignore your game and find something else to occupy their time.
What you CAN do is try to net the would-be pirates who simply have a lower price threshold. Also you might net a few guilt-ridden pirates who think they are "redeeming their sins" by eventually buying the game they pirated, even though it's been a few months since release and the price has dropped significantly in the meantime. You might also pick up a few people who just like thinking they're getting a good deal.
They would only continue to crack and use the ad-free versions. It's been tried before.
Software pirates have an inflated sense of entitlement (which is why they are circumventing the payment structure instead of either paying for things or suffering the indignity of not having access to things they refuse to pay for in the presence of a payment structure); settling for second-class software versions is not part of their agenda.
I would only ask pirates not to fool themselves into hypocrisy over what they are doing, making excuses and deflecting guilt. Realize that you are a psychopath, whether you decide to hide the fact or not. :)
he says he was surprised it was easier to pirate games than to buy them.
Is it free or not?
Jokes apart, compare this with World of Goo feedback. Given that 80% of WoG players could have a pirated version of the game, still devs don't complain and indeed made a give-us-what-you-want birthday sale.
And apparently it worked.
Apparently people want freedom to do what they want with their devices, they want to install what and from where they prefer.
The app store model is broken...too much control in Apple's hands...people don't like this so the chances that they'll use a pirated version are higher.
I don't own an iPhone, but a PS3. When I had to sign up to play SF4 online on their PSN I was so mad at them. Sony doesn't own my PS3, they don't own the copy of the game and don't own the connection used to move data between my host an other players.
Again, the point is simple: piracy will always be there, and most of all, don't think that the 80% of pirated copies would translated automatically in sold software. You're wrong.
Ciao!
"they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did."
It did not occur to this gentleman this his game.... sucked. Read that again and pretend Mitch Hedburg said it... it will be funny. And that part tooo.
How many of the pirates are kids with iPod Touches. I've heard from my brother who is still in high school, that the [anecdotal] majority of them are jailbroken and full of pirated apps.
... in distribution. The most likely explanation, as I see it, is simply that the cracked version has been 'going around' while the application itself remains anonymous in the store. No way is 80% representative for a high-visibility item in the app store; the ratio of vanilla to jailbroken phones can't possibly be tilted in that direction at this time. I think being cracked exposed your app to more people than if it hadn't been, and you're thinking about the math wrong, because most of those 80% pirates wouldn't have even known your app existed if the hadn't gotten it through their iphone-app torrent RSS feed or whatever.
I'd also like to point out that 'try-before-you-buy' doesn't mean "you try then you buy", it also means "you try and you don't buy [but also don't use the app]". I didn't check the OA, but how many of those IDs tried it and then didn't come back? Those are legitimate triers-not-buyers.
So yeah, that's todays excuse.
PS. My iphone isn't currently jailbroken, but back when it was, it never had a cracked app on it.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
How many games have gone public domain? Less than 20%? How many games have had their source code opened?
When you start respecting your end of the copyright bargain, I'll start worrying about it being broken by the public.
with no concept of morality
To start out with, I would like to mention that I have pirated a lot in my lifetime. I pirated more when I was unemployed and poor, because I had lots of time and less money. I still pirate some, but nowadays I also buy more now that I am earning good money. But anyway, here is my viewpoint of piracy.
Most of the excuses pirates use are just that, excuses.
* Try before you buy! It does happen, but rarely.
* Everything sucks! Then why are you pirating it in the first place?
* Damn the evil publishers!! You really believe most pirates are like that?
Want to hear a valid excuse
* It is free to pirate, so I don't have to worry about money.
Now, you will here people mention that these games aren't really that expensive. But that misses the point. There is a huge difference between cheap and free, and it affects behavior a lot. When something is free, you can consume it without feeling like you have to get value out of it. And that gains a certain amount of freedom which is very difficult to compete with if you are trying to charge for a product.
Now, the article in question I actually found was fairly unbiased. It did mention that piracy is high as soon as the game is released. This is not strange at all. As pirates have no restrictions on them in regard to money, they will play whatever they feel like. And the newest thing on the market is simply an easy target.
This may point out that Pirates generally have a lower attention span they quickly move on to the next game
This is a nice observation in the article. I would say that it isn't attention span per se. It is just that pirates have a fare wider selection of items to select from. Again, having to do with the freedom I mentioned above.
The author goes on to discuss ways to combat piracy. And here I want to mention an important thing. If you use piracy protection to fight against piracy, then you are using it wrong. If you use piracy protection to steal customers from a competing product that doesn't have piracy protection then you are doing it right.
If you fail to understand the difference, it is simple. Pirates buy products too. And they are more likely to buy something if they get value out of it beyond legal ownership. This is why authenticated multi player mode is a very efficient piracy protection mechanism. It gives the pirates something that they want to buy, without providing any negative effects on other customers (who may or may not pirate other products).
It is the same in other businesses. If a pirate has to decided between buying a CD of one artist, or attending a live performance of another artist, guess what they will choose. Same with DVD vs. movie theater.
Of course, there are always pirates that won't buy anything. Either because they have no money, or because they intend to use that money for other things. But, those are the kind of pirates that simply aren't worth spending any effort on. At best you can hope that their money habits will change over time, and that you as a developer will be a beneficiary.
This is the RIAA fallacy, presuming that all pirated copies represent lost revenue.
So here we have the argument that the developer isn't actually losing any sales. All of those pirated copies don't actually hurt him. And this might be nearly true, financially. Piracy in this scenario, is more a crime of insult. The pirate is telling the developer who put a good deal of who he is as a person and an engineer into a product that the developer and the product are worth nothing; and that the pirate can do as he pleases with the intellectual property of the developer.
I'm seeing a connection, if only by analogy, with the ferocity by which GPL advocates protect GPL'd software from being used for profit by closed source projects.
Let's say I used a GPL'd library in a closed sourced iPhone app. First, I would be unlikely to be caught, because I mean, who would notice? Second, I wouldn't actually be harming whomever wrote it. I'm not taking bread from their table; and unlike the case of the pirated iPhone app, the original author is very explicitly not wanting to profit from the code. But if informed of my treachery, I'm pretty sure that the author and the entire GPL community would be furious that I was using their property for commercial gain (without releasing the source). I have not done this, and would not do this, but it would be really convenient for me if the ATSC liba52 decoder was under BSD or MIT license.
In both cases, the major wrong would appear to be getting value from someone else's labor without respecting or acknowledging that person and his right to dispose of his work product as he sees fit. But I would think the case of the app piracy is worse because the enabling of piracy is causing non-zero harm to the developer in addition to the insult.
And I would think that anyone who thinks piracy is OK or a victimless crime should also promote the MIT licenses over the GPL.
I refuse to pay for any apps on my iPhone because of the fact that Apple is too insane about thinking something you pay for and own is in all reality still 110% theirs to control and do what they want when they want. Therefor if I just encourage these amateur crashware script kiddies to continue to ride on the coat tails of Apple screwing people over I am in turn encouraging the insane belief that no matter how much money I pay I never own a fucking thing much less have the freedom to do what I want when I want. Pardon me for not being one of the weak minded who bends over and spreads their cheeks for an good reaming from the self proclaimed permanent owners of everything no matter what.
People should get paid for their work? Excuse the fuck out of me I should not have anybody else in control of something *I* bought and paid for.
So, if you dance with the devil you get burned by the flames. Jailbreak and voila! Now I control MY phone and do my part to chip away at a piece of one seriously fucked up business model which is to screw and screw some more anybody they can. In regards to thinking a server connection will solve any woes...if the idea for the app is even half decent it will have a free clone that usually will pale the original piece of garbage to begin with. Besides, some apps you cannot even get in the app store because the author does not want to have to wipe their mouth clean with the back of their hand after pleasuring the Apple God. No need to provide any support to that kind of crooked forced scarcity to fuel their crooked business model. If you don't like how people are fighting back and demonstrating what they want, use some of your coat tail money to go call somebody who gives a fuck.
Apple and their lackeys publishing in the app store can all go eat a dick.
Percentage from _first week_?
Really valid statistics. And total amount sold isn't told anywhere. 80% of what? Ten? Thousand?
Either you know people making the game or you trust (ie. you are a fool) what they say and buy something you don't know or you wait and see what others have to say about the game. That takes several weeks or couple of months.
So it's blindingly obvious that unknown game is _at first_ mostly pirated, they have nothing to lose as they didn't pay for it and this is not even news.
Either article writer/seller is making twisted statistics on purpose or doesn't understand how selling software works. I'll bet they didn't have tv and magazine commercials about it starting months before release date.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a good way to test for it, but you are right on about the issue. The issue is NOT how many people got a copy without paying. The issue is if it was impossible, how many people would have payed?
Reason this is important is because it tells you how much it matters to actually try and fight against it. Fighting copyright infringement takes time and money. Also, the more onerous the DRM you introduce, the more you piss off legit customers and thus the less money you make. So the trick is to find the best balance that gets you the most sales. To do that the most effectively, you need to know how many copies are actual lost sales, and how many would have just done without.
You can compare it in some ways to shrinkage prevention at a store. All stores have problems with shoplifting, and in that case there is real loss since you lose the value of the item stolen. Ok well you could certainly reduce it a whole lot by hiring armed professional guards and forcing all employees and customers to undergo a strip search when they leave. You might even come close to zero. However, the problem is your business would go bust because nobody would shop there, never mind the extreme cost of such security. Thus stores don't do that. Their goal is not to stop all shrinkage, their goal is to maximize profit and that means stopping as much as they can cheaply, and without driving customers away.
Same deal with copying software. I suspect you'd find that a rather large number of the people would simply do without. They aren't lost sales, they would buy it if they couldn't have it for free.
What about some more detail?
Of those users, those who bought it and those who pirated it, how long did they continue playing for? Perhaps the pirates try it (because theres nothing to lose from doing so) and decide it's not worth it... Do any of those pirates come back for more later? You did point out that they seem to have a shorter attention span and quickly move from one game option to the next, perhaps they quickly get bored of the game and don't consider it worth spending money on.
Incidentally, i would not randomly buy a game i hadn't played before, i might consider buying it if i'd played it on a friends device (who may or may not have pirated it). I don't trust online reviews or demo versions (a lot of demos offer the first great level of a game, when you buy the full game you find the remaining levels are crap).
I might pirate it to try it out, but i probably wouldn't drop $4 on the off chance (i hate things which are priced x.99, its more hassle than its worth and is anyone really stupid enough to think 3.99 is really much different from 4.00?), the idea of a beat em up game with the iphone control method seems very strange.
Very few games hold my interest, i might play a couple of hours tops... I have maybe a small handful of games which i can keep coming back to, most of them involve networked play.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I have roughly the same statistics at work, except it's 40+ iPhones and 2 jailbroken (although 5 others have had them jailbroken in the past, but then went back). Most of them are programmers who buy into the whole free software movement, so you'd think all of them would be jailbroken.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is probably not a story of 100% being a pirate or anything, but mostly a landscape of lighter and darker grays.When I started buying game, i bought a lot. Why ? Despite good reviews, a lot of them ended up being utter crap, or with a lot of bugs. So I started "pirating" them game to check them up, then if they were crap I would not buy them. But nowadays ANOTHER problem has cropped up. The game is very very very short. So while I try the game I already finish it in the afternoon. Should I buy it since I enjoyed it up to the end ? Yes I should. But I do not. And usually there are no demo or the demo come LATER. So in a way I am depriving of my money a few software developper and it is not justifiable. But OTOH pirating to get a demo, *IS* justifiable, it avoided me a lot , and I mean a LOT of stinkers. Nowadays i do not even need to pirate. i jsut rent the game (it is in gray zone here around). And i buy on regular basis the game when I like them. I even bought some game which were not findable for more money than the publisher originally asked for, (5-10 euro more) after trying the game and not finding it easily. one such example was Okami, after I tried it at the videothek. So no, it is not only black and white.
... like the body or the subject!) " yeah, my bloody cat DID indeed paw on the mouse and somehow submit the post while I was writing the title
A final word : sicne i started renting game / pirating them my disposable income directed toward the game industry has increased. Because now that I know that what I will buy is GOOD, I buy witghout a remorse. Earlier I got stinged so much that I hesitated or even pushed a sale for later. Not to be burned again. So pirating/renting has allowed the game indsutry to make MORE money from me, even if actually some of the stuff I tryed would be coutned as LOST SALE due to piratery at high sea.
That said "Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That every pirated copy is a lost sale. If he's thinking "I could have made five times as much" then he's very mistaken.
No sig today...
Since shareware is hardly ever documented to any useful degree, it's impossible to tell from the short, and often out of date paragraph of description whether it will, in fact do what it purports to. Nor does it tell whether it will run on my particular O/S, version or if it will screw up any of the other software I am using, or if it has any pre-requisites that the authors have forgotten to mention.. Even worse is the frequent lack of bug lists, workarounds instructions, help/howto files or any or any of the other basic documents that a worthwhile package has.
For these reasons, the only viable way to discover for yourself if a piece of shareware is worth buying is to try it out. Sadly most fail dismally.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Accidentally deleted my comment. Oooooops.
People pirate for these reassons
1. Can not find it - LOL Japan.
2. Can not afford it - Nobody can afford Adobe CS, Maya or even Windows, just to see if it works for them. Remember, software can not be returned or refunded.
3. Can not understand it - Want to see why something is popular but don't want to waste money on it a fad thing.
4. Collector/Archiver - People who pirate so they can brag they have millions of dollars worth of software they never use.
I haven't pirated anything that I actually use. Those I buy. The extent of pirated software, games, music or movies on my PC is stuff other people linked me to, or were found on youtube and see the points above.
The hardcore pirates are those that claim they are doing homebrew or software development on modified gear. In reality the only reason they have bought modified gear is so they don't have to pay to get software for it. Software developers are less than 0.1% the target for modified devices. Pirates are the remaining 99.9% Nintendo knows this.
Few people actually buy software they pirate if they do not intend to use it. The few that do buy after pirating, are due to having a moral sense that they can not profit at someones expense.
Ultimately we are moving backwards to the shareware "first episode" model. First episode is free. The rest is available only online. Remember Wolfenstien and Doom?
Awwwwww
Did da widdle Jew not getta penny? Awwwwwww you poor thing. Go take a deep breath of Zyklon-B and it will all be better poor widdle Jew.
=>Score=
Pirates: 1,379,356,227,198
Greedy Jew crybabies who should get a real job: 0
Do us a favour. Pirating iPhone apps? It isn't actually a serious gaming playform now is it? Develop for the iPhone by all means, just as anybody can, do it for fun, why should people pay you for a mickey mouse game on a mickey mouse platform? If you want o make some money, get a proper job.
Maybe the 80% he identified as being pirates are not actually pirates. After all, when you buy music, or and iPhone App, it is within the license to use that on up to five computers and all their attached iPhones and iPod Touches within the household. So if you had a family of five people each with an iPod Touch or an iPhone they could buy the App once and very legally use it on all the devices. Then, since they had already bought it legally for all the devices there is no reason they would then buy it again. 5 legal users => 80% and it could be higher than that, quite legally, since it is all connected devices to the five computers. These users might not be pirates at all but really valid, legal users that that developer simply failed to account for in his little study. Since he makes no mention of this issue I suspect he failed to take it into account. By the way, I called Apple and asked them about this just to make sure. It's all legal like I described.
There's an app for that.
"Today a game developer decided that he is entitled to 400% more sales than he got."
The fact is, these people made a game and then successfully sold it. There is no evidence presented here that the 80% of people who pirated would've bought the game if they had not got the option of piracy. In fact, the lack of any pirates then buying the game seems to indicate that none of them would've bought the game at all.
So this guy hasn't lost any revenue, not that he has any a priori right to sales anyway. But he is speaking as if pirates had broken into his house and ripped off his jewelry and his laptop.
Its this kind of inflated sense of entitlement displayed by some in the content industry that drove me, someone who works primarily producing content (non-games software in my case) to join the Pirate Party UK.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Standard excuses for not paying for this or any other game (pick any that apply):
1) I will pirate it first and then pay only if I like it (a la when I go into a restaurant and only pay when I really like the food, or go to the theater to see a film and pay only if it didn't suck). If the game is not PERFECT, I don't pay.
2) My pirating is good for the software developer (more people playing, even without paying is good, it gives them lots of free publicity). Piracy increases sales! I am doing them a HUGE favor.
3) I am a cheap ass.
4) There is no such thing as copyright (or shouldn't be). Other people should create art, music, games, films, and entertainment for me as a favor and fund it out of their own pocket.
5) Piracy is a fact in the gaming world. Get used to it. It's the developer's own fault because they should have taken it into account in their business case (besides, they should have been working on this full time as an open source program for free anyway).
6) $50 for a game is too much. Come to think of it, $25 is too. And if it is only $10, or even $0.99, then pirating it shouldn't be that much of a burden to the developer.
7) I do not want to try the demo because the only meaningful way to try out a game is to try out the ENTIRE game.
8) Who cares if there is 99.9% piracy, all the developers need is to make just enough money to fund developing another game. They don't need to get rich (after all, I'm not).
9) "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
10) Because I have never had to create, develop and market a game and I don't have a clue as to what it takes to run a business.
Surely the real question is how many of those who pirate anything are just as willing to forgo payment for work rendered as they are willing to deny payment for work rendered. I find we vigorously promote the "love your neighbor as yourself" rule when it applies to how people treat us and casually ignore it when it applies to how we treat others. This is the human nature fallacy - presuming my behavior is justifiable or at least not bad enough to be offensive while your behavior is just plain wrong.
for me, this is a very heartwarming little story.
if you're stupid enough to have anything to do with apple then you really do deserve every misfortune you get.
From the referenced article:
NOTE: Surprisingly this is MUCH easier than actually buying it on iTunes!!
This is the crucial point isn't it. We can argue about what system of IP is best for nurturing creativitybut there is no bloody getting around that obtaining legit software is a freakin' hustle. Don't try to blame this on "pirating" because that has nothing to do with it - it is a fundamental problem of most buisness models that are around. Really, if I could obtain legit software with the same ease and as little fear of getting scammed as when I (hypothetically) download something with a torrent, I would be a far heftier buyer. But as it is I have to click myself through painful processes, sign away my soul, and will in the end many times end up feeling cheated because of inferior products and shady marketing practices.
Am I missing something here?
1) Sell all apps as demos.
2) Serve full game content via in-app purchases.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Sorry, I hadn't seen this meme for a while, I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms and accidentally esploded.
Gadgetoid.com - Gadgets & Games Journalism
1 Screw apple for controlling your phone even though you bought it.
2 People who pirate are going to pirate. FOREVER! It doesn't matter if they are rich or not. They are just stupid that way and think, "hey even though I put more work in this (or paid someone else to do it because, like I said they're stupid) to get it for free when it would have been easier to just go work some overtime or something and pay for it, this is still cool I got it for free!" So they will never pay for your product in the 1st place.
3 DUHHHHHH, yeah they are going to pirate you should have thought that in your business model before you sold it so you can forecast your income on the real people that really pay for it.
I use to buy almost any LP at licorice pizza for 5.99 then cd's came out same LP 29.99 i said its new the price will drop later.
I went to buy pink floyd wall it was listed at 39.99
40 fu_king years later.
Screw that.
I dont have a cushy job Im a slave i have to break my back.
Now would you slave all day for a 40 year old record.
Thats what they are asking me to do.
You could sue me for a billion dollars i would not care if you won you cant knock me down any further.
I will bet this guys crappy game aint even as fun as elf bowling for free was.
I read TFA, and this is what I learned: ... Cydia is installed via jailbreaking. It is included in Pwnage Tool exclusively for Mac users and redsn0w for Mac and Windows users or QuickPwn for Mac and Windows users running pre-3.1 devices. ..."
You need a jailbroken iPhone to pirate the game. Then you need to download Cydia. From Wikipedia:
"
Then you download a hacked version of the app from "somewhere".
So, either 80% of iPhones are jailbroken and have some "Pwnage" tools installed, or this guy's numbers are out of whack.
Could it just be that, amongst those that hack their phones, a little less respect for software might exist? Naaaaaah.
Is it just possible, that hackers just download games, because they can? Whoa, there, buddy, you're not listening.
He's got some sales amongst those who play by the rules. I would expect that there is the real, viable and bankable penetration level for his game. I sympathize with his frustration, but I can't buy the logic that says he's being burned for 400% of his sales.
He's being burned for some sales, but that number is his sales/normal iPhones x jailbroken phones; and even that is assuming that in every case people jailbreak because they have to, not because they want to, not because they somehow "acquired" an iPhone from the back of a truck, and not because non-sophisticated "script kiddie" level hackers are attracted to non-sophisticated "script kiddie" level hacks and "getting away with stuff".
Hacked iPhones do not, by any stretch, outnumber regular iPhones by a 4-to-1 margin. There is a jump somewhere here that would make Evil Knievel proud, perhaps?
You're doing a lot better than I would have expected, given my experience back in the early '80s when I was in college and EVERYONE seemed to have hundreds of times as many cracked games as bought ones.
Out of 2500 songs downloaded, only 1 album sale is lost.
So if 6*10^9 people download the same song, 2.4*10^6 album sales are lost.
Let me rephrase that. If everybody downloads a song offa' Thriller, Michael Jackson still gets 97.6 million sales. We need everybody to download 42 songs offa' Thriller for MJ to get ~0 sales.
Numbers taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_worldwide
I know I'm taking your equation too literally, but I think this is an interesting way to think about it. Plus, numbers are fun ;-)
And they want their gross exaggeration on a piracy rate back. It was flawed when 2D boy tried this shit with World of Goo. It's bullshit now. NOT EVERY iPHONE USER HAS A JAIL BROKEN PHONE NOR DOES EVERY USER SUBMIT HIGH SCORES.
If I average up how much my games are pirated it's about 15 illegal downloads for every 1 sale. I think it's just ridiculous that people would bother pirating such inexpensive software. I do think it's cool that hundreds of thousands of people play my games, I just wish I had hundreds of thousands in revenue to make more.
Software pirates have an inflated sense of entitlement [...] settling for second-class software versions is not part of their agenda.
I used to not pay for software. That was until I discovered Linux and Free Software, and it dawned on me that I could continue not paying for software, have a cleaner conscience and---as they say---get the job done.
As it happens, not keeping track of key generators is good. Not having to spend an extra 15 minutes on various shady sites is good. If other pirates think like me (I never really know when "[people] think like me" is a good assumption, so judge for yourself), we might have a good target audience to grow the Linux/FOSS user base.
[note that post my Amiga 500 days, I always paid for games. Technology, or the lack thereof, did a lot of preventing me from pirating games, but I continue to buy today even when I have the technology to pirate. Or play free games like Frozen Bubble, Supertux, Wesnoth and Nexuiz.]
Is it just me, or are there a whole bunch of posters appearing recently who vehemently take up an anti-piracy point of view?
My point of view.
FINANCIAL ARGUMENTS
1. THERE ARE NO REAL COSTS AND NO ONE IS DEPRIVED. Software is inherently different from physical products. It costs nothing to *reproduce*, and therefore imposes no direct costs on manufacturers, nor any significant cost to the planet. This point is essential. If you steal bread in order to eat, someone else is deprived of the bread. If you steal software, no one is deprived of that software.
2. THERE ARE LIMITED VIRTUAL COSTS. The claimed costs of piracy are virtual, not real. The software industry claims it loses X amount of sales to piracy. This is virtual in that we have to assume people will buy the software they pirate. But the point of TFA is that people don't want to pay for the software they pirate. If this is the case, then not only are there no real costs, there are no predicted costs. This may or may not hold true across different categories of software (i.e. game vs. productivity software), but the assumption that every pirate is a lost sale is clearly an inadequate idea.
3. THERE ARE LIMITED COSTS TO THE CONSUMER. Some make the claim that pirates raise the cost of software. Because software is a virtual product, it contains little or no real-world costs. It is not something that reliably decreases in cost in mass production, or a drop in natural resources. There is little reason to assume that the cost of Windows 7 would decrease if everyone who ran it owned a genuine copy. It is more reasonable to assume Microsoft would absorb the additional revenue.
4. NO NORTH AMERICAN SOFTWARE COMPANY HAS BEEN BANKRUPTED BY PIRACY. 2D Boy, maker of the World of Goo video game, claimed that 90% (really 82%) of its users were pirates. Soon its parent company Brighter Minds filed Chapter 11. Was it due to piracy? Not likely.
MORAL ARGUMENTS
Many people will say that what is at issue here is not the theft of something material, or the loss of real income, but an insult to the moral right to the products of one's work.
4. THE MORAL RIGHT OF VIRTUAL PRODUCT PRODUCERS IS ITSELF POLITICAL. This moral right to products of the imagination is not written into the laws of nature. It is a law created by people, originally conceived to be of benefit to society by safeguarding the incomes of inventors of new products and ideas. Today intellectual property rights law is the product of the intervention of large corporations, and are to their benefit. The benefit to the average person or to culture generally is questionable. Therefore the basis to this moral right is itself questionable.
5. SOFTWARE IS A FORM OF POWER WITH POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS. Software introduces novel forms of power into the world, which are employed by the end user. Software is therefore not merely technical or financial in nature, but also political because those who have access to software and its effects.
Anyone who has sufficient disposable income to purchase and operate an iPhone or iPod Touch has no excuse not to legitimately purchase the $1-5 entertainment and novelty apps they use.
This is truly shameful.
Developers spend thousands of man hours creating these apps. There is no causal chain by which you could be owed access to these apps in violation of the legal rights of their lawful creators.
If pirates want to play the game, and if you can detect piracy, then you can sell the "piracy space" to advertisers.
Just because pirates steal software doesn't mean they don't buy anything. Maybe they buy Coke and eat Doritos.
Maybe they could sell it to Microsoft or the RIAA for anti-piracy ads.
They hated it so much that they got high scores playing something they couldn't stand to play.
IANAL, but by the plain language of the statue, these individuals have infringed the author's copyright by making unauthorized copies of his software into their non-volatile iPhone memory. While the circumstances exclude criminal liability, civil liability for copyright infringement is limited only by logistics and the will of the author to pursue it.
He should go to court and subpoena the identities of these individuals, and ask for the statutory damages he is entitled to.
I strongly recommend the author consult a lawyer to explore his options here. It's possible an IP lawyer would be willing to take his case pro bono as a trial case.
The "agenda" of software pirates is as differentiated as the people who download software. Enter into the home of almost anybody and you will find VHS and DVD copies of movies. It is so widespread there can be no legitimacy to a psychological profile of the video pirate. The same goes for software piracy.
I'm wondering if his methodology is bad. I haven't read TFA as yet but it seems from scanning the posts here that he was comparing the deviceID that purchased with the deviceID that posted the score... in which case, how is he accounting for the fact that users are specifically allowed to share their apps with up to 5 devices?
I do this all the time between my wife and I. We download games for our kids to play as well as apps and music for ourselves when we find them... then sync up the phones via iTunes (as we are specifically allowed to do) - so that we can share our household purchases between the two phones.
If you assume a maximum of sharing.... take a sample of 100 downloads, then share it out to 5 people = 500 downloads, using his method you instantly have an 80% pirate rate!!!!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Years ago, when I used Windows, I could not help but notice that all the new games I bought would not install or refused to play because of my CD burner. Since the package was opened, I could not get a refund. So I went the only direction I could: download the pirated version and play that.
In a period of two years, I bought at least 15 games at full retail price. Two of them actually were playable. TWO. The other 13 would not play or install because of my CD burner. As you may well imagine, I got rather sick of this. The pirated versions worked like a charm.
A new game was coming out that I wanted to play. This time, I didn't go to the store. I just went straight to the pirates to get the game. I never did pay for it.
I have had an iPhone for about 2 years now, and I am still happy with my hacked / jailbroken 1st gen phone. I am what, amongst my friends, can be considered a computer geek. I can fix computers and code quite a bit, I have hacked my iPhone several times (upgrading from os 1-2-3) and I have no problem pirating games. Still, I have never pirated anything on the iPhone. And yes, I have pirated PC games.
The app store is just too easy and affordable. I buy about 2-4 apps, totalling about $5, per month. This is about equivalent to half a pint of beer here in Norway. I feel I get good value, I compensate developers and I dont get the hassle of hacking. And yes, I consider any kind of manually moving files on my computer and syncing with iTunes a hassle compared to clicking on the app twice on appstore.
I have about 20 friends with iPhone. Out of them about 1 has Cydia installed and maybe a couple would consider pirating. For most people the iPhone represents ease of use, and they dont wanna hack and figure out stuff. I see people all over with the iPhone, and the majority is not the hacking type. Of course it matters what age group and income level we are at, but I still think only a minor percentage of iPhone owners even have Cydia installed. The only number I have seen for is that less than 10% of all iPhones are even jailbroken.
So my point: From this personal annecdotal experience, I claim with confidence that at most 5-10 percent of the Apple iPhone owners have ever pirated an iPhone app. The numbers can be discussed, but the major part of the app market buy their apps.
Then the specific cases can be evaluated. Why is this app pirated so much? Does it appeal to geeks, has it been marketed better in the "pirating" community? Does the pirates download and use / try more sw because its "free"? Are people that upload highscores more likely to be geeks that have hacked iPhones? Are disproportionally more people who have hacked phones living in countries with lower GDP because the iPhone hasnt been sold there before, and they are therefore less likely to pay for apps because they have less money? These and many more are interesting questions, but I still believe that most potential users of iPhone apps does not even consider pirating.
The US originally did not respect foreign copyrights, and that boosted the US publishing industry to the chagrin of writers in Eurpoe (back in the day).
The early US movie industry moved to California in order to avoid copyright law.
Comic book artists trace images from other sources all the time and no one cares.
Disney made films from public domain stories and zealously protects their versions of the public domain ip, pushing for absurd extensions to copyright law.
In the larger culture,
Big businesses are always lining up for subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts from the government. They commonly claim that they must seek maximum profit without any ethics according to law.
The government is always in the news for campaign contributions, personal earmarks, corruption, and absurd favors.
Religion (as seen on tv) is filled with mega-churches and preachers swimming in wealth.
Face it, we're a culture of crooks. The message is clear. Maximize your profit, maximize your wealth. Take what you can freely get, doing 'the right thing' is for chumps. Short term profits at the expense of long term growth is the way to be successful. Not spending $2 on a game is peanuts, but that rich guy didn't get rich by spending needlessly. And you may never be rich, but at least you won't be a chump.
I'm not saying I like it, but that's the culture of today.
Why do they call it piracy?
It's not like you had to board a ship, kill it's crew and rape the women, and then take the chest full of gold. Yeah, the author really had to walk the plank.
All the sexy babes want me... to fix their PC.
Just some quick numbers here showing piracy on the iphone is not a huge problem:
-About 10% of all iphones and ipod touch are jailbroken.
-This study says 60% of apps on jailbroken phones are pirated
-The same study says out of these apps, 34% of installed instances are pirated
Ok, here we are talking different numbers, and we shouldnt really compare or multiply but we do anyway:
10% have the ability, 60% of apps can be pirated, 34% instances of these apps are pirated - 0.10*0.60*0,34 = 0.0204 = 2.04% of apps are pirated
Many point of error here, but for gods sake, stop crying wolf about iphone piracy!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thanks happy, for your Notifications app. I have been looking for this service since the day I bought my iPhone! You rock.
His game didnt sell well because the game "TAP-FU" sucks. Word of mouth traveled fast as soon as it released on Toucharcade.com and others. Many had felt that it had too few levels, and variation to its gameplay. You actually repeat the first level 3 times. Honestly i gave up after the 3rd level so i dont know if there is anything different after. Why? BECAUSE THE GAME IS BORING.
He says pirates use the excuse of "Try before you buy" but he fails to tell you that he did not provide a trial version version on itunes for people to try before buying. Typically this is known as a "lite" version, that is free on iTunes for people to demo before they buy.
So his try before you buy statement is incorrect. There was no way to "Try before you buy" his game, unless you pirated it.
Now what happened, is most people that pirated probably had the same experience as those who paid for it (such as myself).... and that is... IT WASNT WORTH BUYING.
Lets go back to the fact that there was no Trial version on iTunes. When a paying customer finds out that he bought something he is not satisfied with, and he understands that he cant get a refund due to itunes no return policy... even for $1.99, an unsatisfied customer will spread the word of his dissatisfaction. Multiply that by X amount of early adopters and factor in the great power of word of mouth on the internet.
The game was bad. I'm sorry. There are PLENTY of game companies that have started up just because of the success of the App Store on iTunes. Many developers have quit their day jobs and have written very succesful apps that have made them a great deal of money. Some as much as $250,000 in two months (Trisms game dev... and others... just google it)
App developers are making a good deal of money on their Apps. Dont blaim piracy for your poorly designed game that is a rip off of Street Fighters artwork, and a poor attempt at remaking nintendo's Kung-Fu. I admire your efforts to develop the game, and there is potential for it to be good... but there wasnt enough content, the animations were poor, and it lacked finish.
Pirates may have not paid for it, and they may even continue to play it as you state by your scoreboard data... but that doesnt mean it was worth it to them to buy.
OF COURSE... piracy is a concern to all developers... however one must have a piece of software worth buying before you start complaining that no one bought it.
Tap-Fu has 8 reviews on iTunes... and Fieldrunners has 2583 reviews. Granted Fieldrunners has been out for a while now, but it was an instant success that climbed to the top of the iphone app sales list the second it was available. It has made the developer a lot of money, and it is being ported to other platforms...
Piracy didnt stop Fieldrunners. It faced the same circumstances.... except, it was an incredible game worth buying.
Try before you buy doesn't mean you'll always buy. The game could be a terrible piece of shit for all we know.
If they want their stats to be considered seriously, they should submit info about how the flag works. Somehow I think that it would be weird that 80% of people with high scores of a 2$us IPHONE app would be pirates.
I'd say, could it be... that maybe, the flagging is not working correctly? Or perhaps it is flagging just any jailbroken iphone and not necessarily those that are pirated?
I used to pirate tons of stuff , honestly, I live in a country in which 20 USD for something you won't eat in the next couple of weeks is severely overpriced... You wouldn't even find original software in here, but there are countless of 1USD offerings in the streets... I stopped after moving to GNU/Linux and how I noticed that pirating only benefits the proprietary software dudes... Anyway, I still pirate books, yes, books, from the internet. Why? Because I have no credit card, therefore I can't pay online, and because those books are completely impossible to find in here.
It is better to go with free alternatives than to go through the moral aspects of pirating. Most commercial software is extremely overrated anyway, this game might be an example. There are casual games for free out there...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
You can pirate an iPhone app? How? I've bought plenty of iPhone apps, and downloaded others for free. I didn't even know you could pirate an iPhone app. How do you do it?
San Francisco Photographers
Wow I was modded flamebait?
There was nothing flamebait about it. Hmmm...
with an app currently sitting in the top 10 selling of all apps for the past week, and I don't worry for one minute about piracy of my apps ...
These 80% piracy numbers are hogwash - only about 10% of users have jailbroken phones, and of those about a third pirate their software ... so there's a _max_ of about 3% of sales you'll lose on average, probably less as that third may well the be third that otherwise wouldn't have bought much.
Sure you might find a much greater number of total installs that are pirated for apps with very few sales, but unless you have a cost-per-install (like an online multi-player game with heavy server costs) that's totally meaningless as that doesn't translate in any way to actual lost sales! For me personally i see it as a positive if people are spreading the word about my game by pirating it when they otherwise would never have bought it - in fact we chose to give this top 10 app away for free initally for a few days to gain word-of-mouth, something which was hugely successful, despite all our 'lost' sales.
Also, I have a jailbroken iphone (I had to jailbreak it to use it in the country I live in), but purchase all my apps - asides from any ethical reasons, simply because its just so much easier than the hassling of pirating, especially if you want updates.
You keep bringing this same thing in to every discussion, but are you saying that people should be allowed to download those songs *because* only 1 album sale is lost? So that's your rationalizing for piracy?
I agree that it makes a very bad reason for arguing that this
behavior is moral, but there's a flip side: it makes a good reason that the people who should be looking out for the maximum benefit to society shouldn't be passing laws which cause collateral damage to society (as in, causing extreme economic distress to, or stripping basic human rights from, people who are guilty of doing this action) in the name of saving that one album sale.
... in some other legit way approved by the maker, why do you think you should be obligated to get them? Even more so if you want to get them for free. If you dont approve with the price, you just dont get it then. Live with it and dont go stealing it and try to rationalize it.
I find it interesting to compare your point with the fact that the ideal goal of advertising, in some sense, is to raise having the product in question to the level of being a necessity, in the eyes of the consumer. When I think about it, it seems to me that advertising is a lot like copyright violation, in that some advertising is certainly moral, yet other, more abusive forms of advertising are probably not.
I definitely fall under the category of "I wouldn't buy it anyway." For years, I held myself to the code of not pirating mp3s, instead, I listened to midis or rarely streamed music via Youtube or used internet radio. I played freeware games rather than pirating commercial ones. I used OpenOffice rather than Microsoft Office, pirated.
If something is not easily piratable and has a hoop or several that I must jump through, I won't go through the trouble. I'll find some free alternative. If I can get it for free as easy or easier as I can get a free alternative (I find mp3s easier to find than midis, for example, and I found Microsoft Office was insanely easy to get once I needed it for a class) , then I will go the more dishonest route.
If I can't beat copy protection very quickly, I won't.
And if it is relevant, I do have some standards. I won't play World of Goo and I did buy Democracy 2 after I pirated it because I enjoyed it so much. The same goes for the Baseball Mogul series.
Is any of this a justification? Not really. I'm really guilty as charged but I'm also guilty of taking the path of least resistance.
So let me get this straight, you have a phone that costs around $400 that allows you to put applications on it. The applications cost between $1 and $4, yet you have people whose time is worth so little to them that they bother to go through the trouble of jailbreaking their phone, installing weirdo software on it, downloading the apps from some pirate site and then installing it on their phone all to "Try it out first"? what a waste of time! just buy the damn app! even it it is only a dollar, you're out about...what...a DOLLAR! as opposed to the $10-$20 in personal time you have spent with your "free, pirated, jailbroken" app.
I'm afraid that you people who pirate things just don't understand economy. Your attempts at stealing are actually costing you much more than just buying the app in the first place.
Save your time and money and just spend your dollar through the legit way and then post your review to the site to warn others if you don't think the app is worthwhile. People generally key on negative things and a lot of times, such reviews offer interesting tidbits of information about why something is good or bad.
You'd probably want some "unreasonable" price to let me harvest your lungs tomorrow, wouldn't you?
The point is a property owner ought to be able to say "sorry, this isn't for sale AT ANY PRICE."
I cant first order the food and drinks and only after that decide if it was good enough to be paid.
That is about the worst possible example to give because you can do EXACTLY that. I have, admittedly only on one or two occassions, done exactly that: once because the service took far, far too long so we got up and left telling them why and on the second occassion because the service was slow but when the food arrived it was cold (probably sitting out waiting for a server).
Of course you have to be able to tell that something is wrong with the first bite or so but effectively you do place an order, sample it and then determine whether it is worth paying for. Of course because this is done in person there is a significant reluctance threshold to overcome since you have to be prepared to argue with someone who may well be angry at your comments which is partly why it does not work online.
No, they *submitted* personal high scores to be judged with other high scores online. Since most games these days allow you to submit a high score after the very first round because the previous high score was 0, I'd say that it's not entirely clear how good these people actually were. There are lots of other facts missing that are necessary to come to any conclusion here.
However, some authors, like J. K. Rowling, are rich greedy bastards who don't care about the disabled. I already own all her books, and most of the movies. I felt pretty good about downloading her collective works on The Pirate Bay, and would encourage all of you to get it there to punish her.
The Harry Potter series in all media/formats including audiobook and large print editions are available from your local or regional public library.
Customized digital audiobooks and players are free loans to the blind and disabled - distributed by the Library of Congress - a service which began in the 1930s.
Postal delivery or digital download.
It is lunatic for anyone with failing vision to waste his time and energy on text to speech conversion when these professional readings are freely available.
The Braille edition of the Deadly Hollows costs $15. The full set in Braille: $60. Promoting Braille Literacy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
It is hard to "punish" someone who is richer than the Queen of England.
Apple does not provide any such information in the sales reports - just aggregate sales per country / region. If you want to tell whether an app is pirated, you need to detect it some other way.
I'm curious - are the legitimate paying users aware that their phone's unique ID is being submitted along with their high score? I'm not one to condone piracy, but I believe the author's potentially not being honest either.
If you've got that little faith in the app store, maybe you shouldn't bother with it in the first place.
Nice idea - but how can you do that once you have already paid out for the hardware and want to use it? The reason I use the app store is because there is no alternative other than to jail break my iTouch (with all the attendent unreliability that will no doubt follow) and then my impression is that I cannot use the AppStore at all. Since Apple control the DRM how hard would it be for them to allow 30 minutes of app use for free? They already let you listen to 30 seconds of songs and videos for free or, alternatively, let you return the app for a full refund if you have owned it for less that 24 hours.
The problem with the DRM lock in to the AppStore is that it seems to have created and all-or-nothing market. Either you stick completely to the AppStore and all the controls Apple apply, or you Jail break you device so that you can use legitimate, OpenSource code and other applications that Apple don't want you to use, but then all the commercial apps have to be pirated. So far there is nothing that I really want to do that will make me Jail-break my iTouch but if they come out with a way to make a BlueTooth GPS work with the iTouch just watch how fast I switch.
If the piracy rate was 80% then between myself, my mother, my father, my brother and my wife, only one of us would not have a jail-broken phone. And despite how easy it is to jail-break a phone, only one of us (myself) would have the warewithall to do it.
Now it could very well be that this particular game is popular with high school students or some other audience who may have a much higher rate of piracy than the overall audience of people. But I have to wonder how that piracy flag was determined in the first place: was it determined by seeing if it is running on a jail broken phone? Was it determined through some sort of licensing handshake made with their servers using some personally identifying piece of information? Something else?
I wonder, in large part because if you own two or more devices and sync it with the same computer, you can install the same purchased software on all of your devices--by Apple's design. In other words, if we own a family computer, and my wife and I own an iPhone and an iPod Touch, all of which sync with the same iTunes installation--then I can buy one piece of software and install it on all four devices.
If I can legally do this--since Apple's App Store contract essentially says you will allow Apple to distribute your software according to their terms--then I pay for a piece of software and install it on all four devices I'm legally allowed to install it on--then it is not piracy, despite protests from the iPhone developers.
So what percentage really is piracy, which are false flags, and which are installations on shared devices on the same account? Hmmmm?
A lot of folks are making the argument that just because you can't afford it doesn't mean you should pirate it and instead you should just go without. While I get that this adheres to a nice and simple principle of fairness, the author is the one that really pays the price. Think about it, if I pirate a game and it's a good game, I'm likely to talk to my friends about it. Maybe you get a sale out of my word of mouth, but even if you don't, you're getting a lot of free marketing out of the deal. Plus, you're exposing me to how good your stuff really is so I may purchase another title legitimately in the future when I have the money (think college student). Or maybe there comes a point where piracy is impossible (ya, unlikely) or you release a game that's heavily online (ie wow...much more likely), and now I'm forced to buy it. It'd be tough to pass up your new game if I loved your old one so much. The point is that you lost no money when I initially pirated, but it really does increase your chances at a future sale with the pirate and gives you free word of mouth advertising in the mean time. Honestly, it's way better from a business perspective to be pirated than simply ignored isn't?
You can't tell if an app wasn't pirated, but you can tell if it was pirated the easy way. Up until a few months ago, the most common method of pirating an app modified the app, or something in one of the apps directory contents, differently than iTunes did, and that was easy to detect. So the app pirate numbers were very likely under-reported, not vice versa.
Installing a purchased app on another device from the same (legitimate) iTunes account is not pirating. It's explicitly allowed according to the standard iTunes terms and conditions.
It's about realizing that there is a value to peoples' time and that they deserve to be compensated for that time if they so wish. If they so wish.
I completely agree with that principle but unfortunately it has to be balanced by the right of the purchaser to use what they purchased in a manner that they wish. If I purchase a table the carpenter who made it cannot tell me that I am not allowed to put it in my kitchen for example. However this is frequently what happens with modern technology e.g. DVDs that I purchase in the UK are not allowed to play on my Canadian DVD player.
These restrictions are completely undefendable, unjust and in no way affect the right of the artist to receive compensation. The problem is that governments do absolutely nothing to stop this and stop these unreasonable restrictions - indeed many actually back them up. The result is that people get extremely frustrated and the only way to relieve that frustration is to break the restrictions which is exactly what happens. In the process they come to view all producers of such media as money-grabbing, greedy corporations and so feel completely justified in their actions - even when they go well beyond what is reasonable - because now they are angry.
This is a common theme through history. Just look at the Cornish smugglers in the 1700's and all the illicit alcohol operations in prohibition US. When society is frustrated with unjust restrictions placed upon it they will find a way around them...but being outside the bounds of mainstream society they wil go far further than what is reasonable. Of course this in no way justifies those actions but given human nature they are an inevitable result when faced with unjust restrictions and no legitimate way to deal with them.
I download books from TPB to try before I buy. Seriously. If I read the book to completion or near-completion, I buy it. Not because of guilt, but because I want to have a paper copy of the book in my collection to share with others.
Is this acceptable? Would we consider it acceptable if libraries never existed? How would you like to have to go to a bookstore and sample for hours and hours to find anything worth reading?
Beyond which, I rarely read and never bought books before I began downloading from TPB. Now I have access to so many books and can try out anything I'm interested in that day. It's an amazing thing.
"Since a common excuse for piracy is "try before you buy," they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did."
Must have been a shitty game then.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
I read many times over the past decade or so all sorts of opinions on the subject of copyright, copying data, property etc. I have one clear answer to all of this:
copy the money.
Do any of you understand how the money enters the society? Let's simplify, how does new money enter the US economy?
One way that the money supply is created is by the federal government
The FED prints (or simply pushes some buttons on a computer and creates) cash and this new money is given to government contractors, 'loaned' to main banks etc.
This means that whoever is the first to get this newly created money gets the most out of it, because after all, every newly created dollar dilutes the value of all other existing dollars.
I have something to say about it: the government forces its monetary monopoly among the population, but I believe it is illegal and immoral. Everyone should be able to print their own money.
So do this: copy the money and use it to buy things.
You can't handle the truth.
I was skeptical about your sig:
Yes 48k AAC+ sounds like 160k OGG. Try it: http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=520194 (WinAmp)
So I tried it out and, hey, I was pleasantly surprised. I wish they played more complex music so I could better tell if it really does match up but, without a comparison, I must say it's above satisfactory from what I'm hearing.
My entire 15gb music collection is in ogg barring a few hundred meg of mp3s so I'm definitely put back a little that a 48kbps stream sounds nearly as good as my 160kbps...
Okay the song just switched, I'm beginning to hear some difficiencies. Something about the voices, the "unncceeeee" sound high end and the bass hits...it's a little off. Perhaps it's a case of diminishing returns. You get most of the value from 0-64kbps and all the rest of bandwidth is gravy, but not exactly necessary for listening enjoyment.
Anyway, pleasantly surprised. I wonder how 160kbps aac+ sounds? :)
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
then i'm all for it.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
This study is pointless unless you actually could do the measurement with a more protected game version as well (which for obvious reasons is difficult to do). What really matters is not how many people downloaded a "free version" of the game but how many actually paid. The number of paying customers might very well be higher than if the game hadn't been pirated at all. The mere fact that the game was made available (to a certain degree) is not enough to make any conclusions for or against more content protection nor can we use this information to estimate how much more money the producers would have made with a different strategy.
The point is a property owner ought to be able to say "sorry, this isn't for sale AT ANY PRICE."
In that case, why is it good public policy to treat a copyright as property in this sense? How does withdrawing a culturally significant work from the market for decades on end "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the constitution of the home country of Disney and Apple puts it?
If it's too expensive (like $60 games), I can etiher wait a year, where it becomes $20
Thrice I've waited for a PlayStation 2 game to hit the bargain bin. Thrice I got the "DNAS Error -103: This software title is not in service" error the day I broke the shrinkwrap and tried to play online because the publisher had taken the game offline in favor of its newer titles.
From Toucharcade:
"Ethan Nicholas is one of the big indie success stories of the App Store. Nicholas quit his job back in January after his tank artillery game iShoot grabbed the #1 spot in the App Store. Nicholas reportedly made over $800,000 within five months."
This is just one of MANY games that made a crap load of money via legal sales on iTunes. Such games as that include, Trisms, Space Invaders: Infinity Gene, 2 Across, Fieldrunners, Real Racing, Madden, Tiger Woods, Need for Speed, Flight Control, AIM, Baseball Stars, Texas Hold'em, Rock Band, Tap Tap Dance, and MANY MORE....
These games have made a lot of money in very short time. Trism's made the indie developer, $250,000 in 2 months. 2 Across, also made an indie developer $1800 a DAY in sales. Tap Tap Dance, made $6,927 a week when it launched. Now Tap Tap has several games out, which are HUGE successes for an indie developer on the iphone. You can only imagine how profitable they are now.
This developers game (Tap-Fu) is bad. Its not a good game. Its not even a complete game. Its missing most of the story mode, as it hasnt been made yet. It has very simple gameplay that really doesnt work well.
There was no trial version for the game. Many games have free trial versions known as "lite" versions on iTunes. The developer tries to shoot down the idea that warez users tend to try out software, then some possibly buy it.
Frankly by not providing a free trial version via itunes, he forced people to try out a warezed version.
I bought Tap-Fu after reading about it on Toucharcade.com. It looked promising, but it fell flat. Its bad. iTunes has a no return policy.... perhaps that forces more people to use warez versions because the proof is that... PEOPLE DO BUY these apps legally... IF they are good and worth it. These companies do make good money selling them. The App store has helped keep the indie developement scene alive. Many people have quit their day jobs to code Apps full time that generate $200,000 in profit in 2 months.
TAP-Fu was simply not a good game. At least in my opinion
The fact is, all of those games I mentioned above have made a LOT of money, under the same circumstances as this developer's "Tap-Fu" game. They all faced the "threat" of piracy. The difference is, those other games were worth owning, and Tap-Fu is not. That's the real reason why its not selling well. Not some silly piracy excuse.
The developers score board data is certainly interesting, but it is not proof of ANYTHING, other than people didnt find his app worth buying. MOST apps arent worth buying, or even installing illegally...
There are a good handful of ones that are... and they do make money. Lots.
The obvious coming trend is for a larger and larger proportion of game code to be controlled by larger entities. Instead of buying games, you'll just buy a license to play which will connect via low-latency pipe to your local game company where they stream game content to you online via video or some other medium. Or much like WoW, you'll get a game client but the majority of the game code will remain on servers controlled by the distributor.
It's just easier to control piracy when you never actually release the game code.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Lots of companies selling high-priced software won't send you a disk any more. In some states, if you get a disk, you have to pay sales tax. If you download, you don't pay the tax.
I'm not sure what you're complaining about. If you are owed software and haven't received it in a timely manner, then call the Mathworks and get them to fix the problem. Complaining to Slashdot or waiting are not really problem-solving strategies -- unless your real problem is that you'd like to justify pirating MATLAB.
If the market is unwilling to financially support a work and would rather pirate it instead, then said work is not a viable product and has no real value. NO ONE has any inherent right to make money doing whatever they want, no matter how much effort they put into it.
If you can't make a living making something as trivial as games, get a new career or find some rich eccentric to bankroll your so-called “art”.
Where developers/artists get such a sense of entitlement from is beyond me. The only thing piracy stats prove is how completely out of touch they are with the market; a market that is currently in a huge recession with massive unemployment, I might add...
"Since a common excuse for piracy is "try before you buy," they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did."
Dude, none of them bought the app, because it sucked.
Be seeing you...
One experience != truth.
Just because anyone who tried the game first and DIDN'T buy it doesn't mean anything. It might have easily been crapware.
Am I the only one who thinks about the video game crash of the 80's when I hear about how the app store has 70,000 apps?
Just because you have 70k apps don't mean any of them are good, and in fact, it means peeps have to wade thru more crud to find the few good apps.
guess maybe this is modern gold pan mining. Maybe, just maybe, you'll find a gold nugget...
Be seeing you...
Come on guys. Obviously I'm speaking more to the iPhone, but I don't understand how anyone can afford the device and not be able to shell out less than a pack of gum for an app. This is the age old argument (which I happen to agree with) that eventually not paying developers for creating their apps is going to result in no apps being created to steal in the first place. Perhaps the distribution vs. revenue model will be evolved, but it's only getting more expensive to develop a really top tier title on ANY platform.
I agree that the big guys' price range for apps is a bit ridiculous for what is being delivered, but by and large the indies genuinely need the support just to continue doing business.We can't have a one way street if everyone is going to prosper in this scenario-that means the people who love playing games, AND the people that love creating them. Stealing an app that costs between .99 and 2.99 is just weak.
Another thing that's interesting to me is just how many jailbroken phones/touches this hows are out there. I think we are really still at the very beginning with all of this portable-digital-distrubution-ey goodness; it'll be cool to see what we've got and how we get it ten years from now, that's for sure. For now though, show some love. After all the crap they have to go through just to get their apps into iTS, these people deserve it.
This whole notion of releasing these tiny, little crap software programs for money and profit is absurd. This is why I can't stand the Apple commercials advertising their thousands of "apps" for this and that...they never mention the fact that said apps are being released by greedy developers who insist upon selling them. And it seems Apple doesn't even want developers to release the source code of their apps either. We have to accept the fact that Apple is actually trying to fuel the proprietary software "industry" on their iPhone platform, and that it is in their best interests for people to sell their apps, and dupe users into thinking they should have to pay for such software. What a waste of talent when so many talented developers are writing useless iPhone apps in an attempt to make money instead of contributing to decent open source software for everyone to enjoy...
Thank god my N900 will be able to run whatever open source apps I chose, free of piracy...
When an app costs a dollar or two, why the fuck would you pirate it? seriously? I've had an iPhone for a bit over a year and the apps are so well priced it's just not worth the bother to pirate them. My opinion is that if someone is going to go to the trouble of pirating a $1 app, no force in heaven or hell could make them actually buy it.
Possibly the dev should consider that his game just sucks, and nobody who does try it would want to buy it.
The key point missing here is how many actual transactions that 20% of non pirates represents. That such a large proportion pirated it is interesting, but is there any harm? is there sales diversion (I think we may safely assume that someone who is willing to circumvent a fee of $3; $2 now apparently; can never be considered a lost sale; granted there may be a small subset who live in a region it isnt offered for sale or do not have a means of payment acceptable to iTunes.)? or is this noise obscuring the real signal, did the effort of developing the app and submitting it to iTunes store pay off?
It might be that an 80% piracy rate is a broadly unavoidable part of the system; are the two even comparable sets of data or do 100% of people who have heard about it and are willing to pay for stuff buy it and 100% of idiots who have heard of it and like to fill their phone with a bazillion things for no useful reason pirate it. The real question should be does it impact profits and return on investment and are the costs of preventing it ever going to be recouped with additional sales?
Personally I am firmly in the category where I would shell out $3 on the strength of a few screenshots without a demo, it just isn't expensive enough to worry about for me. Hell, I shell out much more than that on steam pre-orders just on the strength of who is developing a game. The question remains is this level of piracy even causing a problem?
I am not going to attack the morals or ethics here, you make your choices and takes your chances; Personally I am of the view that piracy can not be justified; it is something you do as a child before you have finished learning right from wrong. You want to make a free software stand, then do not use commercial software. You want something, buy it, build it or trade for it; not willing to do that, live without it. Sure, current business models may be broken and I am sick of being treated like a fscking criminal by every game publisher who isn't stardock, but that doesnt change my view.
Just my $0.02
err!
jak.
I think a big issue here is there's no physical item to buy. When you pirate something and like it, you might buy it to have the nice box and whatnot. At least, that's for me. I am a pretty big otaku, and I pirate anime when I want to check it out. More often than not, unless it REALLY sucks(try before you buy!), DVDs, manga, and merch. from the series quickly fill my shelves. My room is beginning to look like something from Otacool http://www.figure.fm/feature/en/otacool/. If there was no DVD to put on my shelf, where's the incentive for me? I definitely understand this isn't true for everyone; some people genuinely want to get games and not pay. But I think the issue of buying some string of bits, that's generally no different than the one you downloaded, isn't a good incentive for many pirates to go legit.
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Why not display if the copy is pirated on the high score table where everyone can see, and offer a link to "pay now" right there (by paypal?). You could make it apply only over a certain score, so try-before-buying people are not affected, but if you invest serious time in getting a descent high score, are you really going to want to known as someone who didn't pay? To apply more pressure, you could have "pay within X days or have your score removed".
Aaaawwwwww poor widdle Jew dropped a penny! What's next widdle Jew, your fairy tale about the holocaust? Too bad there never was one but I damn sure hope I get to witness one finally taking place for you over breeding sub-animals.
The only thing new to your Jew-sualem will be a glowing crater when Iran wipes your illegal squatter base off the face of the Earth. Just like a Jew though, what can be expected from you sub-animal wastes of life and space and the resources you horde. Do yourself a favor and watch some heroes cutting off the heads of worthless zionists like you. There are more heroes than you would like to think dumbass Jew. Humans know all about you sub-animals and you have not fooled as many as you would like to think. Don't forget to get your panties in a bunch watching a factual documentary like "The Eternal Jew."
Don't forget your penny either, another one of you things may smell it and then you will get into a Jew fight and smear your horrible stench all over.
People's response to claims of piracy by game makers:
- There is no piracy.
- To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn't, it's your fault.
- If you try to protect your game, we'll steal it as a matter of principle.
It's like, who wouldn't want to bend over backward in their service? You need to know it, because nobody else is going to tell you: you guys sound like Goddamned subway vagrants. Of course when you speak exclusively to each other, it all sounds so reasonable. It'll be reasonable when you all board the bus, and the songs you sing en route to excoriate your enemies will be forceful, but within reason; and when you douse yourself with gasoline and immolate yourself in front of the offices of Infinity Ward, one assumes this will be reasonable also.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
funny you should mention that....I didn't buy it from Apple or from AT&T....I bought it from a third-party that didn't impose the same limitations (and thanks to MediaMonkey, I'm not 100% bound to iTunes and its limits either)
All this really says is that the population of people who want to pay $2 to play his game is one-fifth of the size of the population of people who want to play his game. If he's chosen his price right, he gets more money by charging that paying group $2 than he would if he charged $0.99 and attracted a slightly larger paying group.
You will never have a situation where everyone who wants a thing will buy it. The availability of pirated copies might alter the scale of this phenomenon (this would be interesting to study), but it happens with non-duplicatable goods and services too. Every choice of price point excludes a set of interested persons, for the sake of making money from the remainder.
The neat thing about digital goods is that we can observe and estimate the size of this group, where in physical goods they're invisible except through surveys because they never acquire the product in the first place. This can tell us interesting things about the groups to which our game is relevant. As Valve's Jason Holtman said, "Rampant piracy is just unserved customers." At four-fifths, our iPhone developer is probably doing quite well for the platform. If it were nine-tenths, it might indicate a need to re-evaluate the game or its price point in the context of its player base.
Maybe I'm trolling here, but doesn't the App Store have a period where they can refund your money? I have an Android and the Google App Market lets you do that. Also with almost every game there's a trial/demo version of it that you can download for free.
If there isn't a way for Apple to refund your money, then yes it's a lot of their fault. They're charging gobs of money to get started on the iPhone platform. Why can't they use some of that profit to help consumers? Then again, it's not like Apple to do much in way of functionality.