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.

Comments

Re:Maybe the game sucked?

[Bert64]

I resent paying money for something that can be gotten for free...
I also resent paying money for something that can't be gotten for free, but i will shop around for the lowest price.
Everything else is coming down in price, hardware becomes cheaper and faster all the time, services keep getting cheaper because they are outsourced to asia... Yet there will be a floor to these things at which they can't get any cheaper... The floor for software is 0.

Also consider, software is basically a set of instructions for doing something with a piece of hardware... Such knowledge is often shared freely, people show their friends how to do things, software is just a more complicated set of instructions.