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iPhone Game Piracy "the Rule Rather Than the Exception"
An anonymous reader writes "Many game developers don't think of the iPhone as being a system which has extensive game piracy. But recent comments by developers and analysts have shown otherwise, and Gamasutra speaks to multiple parties to evaluate the size of the problem and whether there's anything that can be done about it. Quoting: 'Greg Yardley confirms that getting ripped off by pirates is the rule rather than the exception. Yardley is co-founder and CEO of Manhattan-based Pinch Media, a company that provides analytic software for iPhone games. ... "What we've determined is that over 60% of iPhone applications have definitively been pirated based on our checks," he reveals, "and the number is probably higher than that." While it's impossible to estimate how much money developers are losing, it involves more than the price of the game, he says. "What developers lose is not necessarily the sale," he explains, "because I don't believe pirates would have bought the game if they hadn't stolen it. But when there is a back-end infrastructure associated with a game, that is an ongoing incremental cost that becomes a straight loss for the developer."'"
What's up the past few days. Stories about iPhone development sucks, Android development rules, no wait Android development sucks and iPhone development rules, no wait iPhone owners are a bunch of pirates.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
I wonder if maybe he is being clever with his phrasing, and instead of 60% of all app installations being cases of piracy, the fact he is trying to state is that of the apps in the app store (more probably, the apps that they instrument), 60% of them have been pirated at least once.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's nice to see a big name admit that 1 pirated copy != 1 lost sale.
If people would not have been inclined to purchase the software if piracy was unavailable, then is piracy really an issue? The question should be, then, whether the availability and ease of piracy takes customers, who would otherwise buy the game, away. If it does, then it is a problem. But if the only people who pirate are the ones who wouldn't otherwise purchase the software, then it takes nothing away from developers other than their pride.
I also think this question is unanswerable. Impossible to know how many people would have otherwise purchased something if not for the availability of a pirated version.
Our headlines today:
* DRM doesn't work
* People are assholes
* iPhone the same as any other platform shocker
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
My company also tracks iphone piracy rates. And while the piracy rate is in line with the OP there's more to it than that. Apps with demos generally have lower piracy rates. Also we track usage rate, pirates tend to only launch once or twice, as if they're sampling the app. So it's not as bad as the article makes it sound.
"Yardley is co-founder and CEO of Manhattan-based Pinch Media, a company that provides analytic software for iPhone games...."
I'm sure reporting greater pirating numbers is in Mr. Yardley's financial interest as well. Not to say there isn't pirating going on but when the entity reporting the pirating number derives a living from said numbers I tend to be a bit skeptical. It is like the RIAA's number's, there has to be some basis for truth in them, but you can rest assured they are massaged and slanted to show the greatest impact to the paying customer...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
No, he's stating that (at least for games) 60% or more of your users are pirating the app. He's also right.
It was mentioned earlier in a Slashdot comment that iPhone apps can be legally shared between a few devices. That is, non-jailroken iPhones.
Did they take this into account when making these assumptions?
Overpriced to begin with? Rubbish. They cost loads less than on any competing platform. It's almost laughable how consumers will argue about how a $2 app is only worth $1 or even should be free.
Whenever a developer claims to be "losing money" to piracy, one has to wonder... are the developers losing this money trying to combat piracy directly (lawsuits and DRM tactics), or is it simply a case of self-flattery, where the developer is grossly over-estimating the value of their software, thinking "If my software isn't great, then why would anyone pirate it?"
Perhaps its time for some self-reflection. You are just another pawn in an industry wide problem spanning over 30 years. Chances are, you and your app aren't special. The piracy was likely nothing more than a bulk job handled indescriminately with no concern for you or anyone else.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Can't we get someone who's [sic motherfucker] first language is English to proof-read these things?
It's whose, motherfucker, not who's.
--
Brought to you by the department of abusive language correction.
I have a jailbroken phone and it was ridiculously easy to do so. So does my girlfriend and technically speaking, she's amish. In short, jailbreaking a phone is stupendously simple, so much that I wonder why even Apple's numbers claim that the figure is something like 10% of all iphones are jailbroken.
That being said, it would appear that pirating apps from the app store, while not hard, would take at least a little more technical know how than the average iphone user has or is willing to put up with.
So jailbreaking an iphone, which takes almost no technical know how is done by 10% of users and pirating apps, which takes more know how, results in 60% of games being pirated?
Doesn't that essentially indicate the apps are overpriced to begin with? (not that this is a legitimate excuse for pirating them).
The Pinchmedia report is a must read. It shows there is a definite link between wealth and piracy ( GDP is negatively correlated with piracy) and pirates use apps intensely for a couple of weeks then mostly abandon them which may indicate that they either lost intrest and wouldn't have bought anyway or bought it after a "trial" piracy period.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
This is a bit off topic, but is anyone else tickled pink by Appulous's "troll bridge"? Due to the user load, they've implemented what amounts to a nerd-captcha on the front page to keep non-nerds out of the site. Since it's a nerd quiz, the questions are hilarious. Yesterday the question was how to join their IRC channel, and today it's how to rename a folder.
I'm sure someone is leaking the answers the first chance they get, but the notion of a nerd quiz to gain access to a site is a riot.
No, he's stating that (at least for games) 60% or more of your users are pirating the app. He's also right.
He's not actually "Just over 60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated. This estimate is also low, since application pirates occasionally disable our tracking. When an application is pirated, an average of 34% of all installs are cracked — in other words, about half of legitimate paid downloads."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Actually reading the article, I was right, quoting from approximately the fifth paragraph:
Just over 60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated. This estimate is also low, since application pirates occasionally disable our tracking. When an application is pirated, an average of 34% of all installs are cracked -- in other words, about half of legitimate paid downloads.
He says that for apps that have seen piracy, an average of 34% of the installs are pirated.
So the 60% was just their way of stating the biggest possible percentage.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I have a jailbroken 3gs (typing this on it now). Have bought some absolute shit apps off the app store, even at a buck they were overpriced. Now I tend to try the cracked ones first. I'd I like them they get deleted and bought. Dungeon Defense, Pocket Universe, Doom Resurrection, etc. Funny thing is most of the utils I use the most are only available on a jailbroken phone: unix shell and the like. I'm likely in the minority of when as I really do "test drive" but I've been burned too many times at a buck or two already.
Trolling is a art,
Don't change the meaning of the article when summarizing.
over 60% of iPhone applications have definitively been pirated
as submitted
60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated.
(as written in the article, bolding included)
Let's "reverse-bold" that...
60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated.
(emphasis mine)
It might be relevant to non-pinch-using apps, it might not. But let's not delete that relevant bit of data.
The statement means exactly what it says. 60% of apps have been pirated at least once. TFA says
(Of the phones that are Jailbroken and running software that they instrument, they indicate 38% were determined to be running at least 1 pirated app.)
No kidding. If an app "should be free" because it clearly took so little effort to develop, then I encourage would-be-pirates people to simply write it themselves. If they don't have the ability to write it but want to use it, then it is worth something to them.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It means what it says, but the poster I replied to misunderstood it, and then someone else replied to me vehemently arguing that it meant 60% of installs...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's Motherfucker, Motherfucker.
The same could be said about music, but that doesn't go over so well :)
Perhaps it's time to RTFS. The guy's talking about things like servers for multiplayer games being exploited by non-paying customers.
I take it you don't know what 'sic' means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
The gist of it is that he is reproducing someone else's text who has the spelling error in it. He is showing he knows its wrong and that it is the other guy's mistake not his.
Of course, if TFA doesn't say who's in the wrong context then he's just being a smartass.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
the apps arent really overpriced at all. There have been many success stories on the app store. Good developers, indy developers etc... making good money, quiting old jobs to make apps full time etc.
It doesnt sound at all like piracy has hurt app developers. Just look up how much the developers of tap tap, fieldrunners, 2across, trisms, etc have made. They've all made a lot of money, and they're the little guy in this industry
The app store is a success.
Piracy is more of a fear and it's used as an excuse by developers who write bad software that doesnt sell. The app store is flooded with garbage. The best of the bunch have all been very profitable for the developers.
Piracy is always a factor, but it's unrealistic to ever expect to stop it, or that it is entirely wrong in an economy that is run by extremely rich, greedy criminals who get billions of tax payer dollars in the form of federal bail outs when they cry wolf.
BLAME THE POOR!
yeah...
Indeed - after re-reading it (rather than looking at all the pretty graphs), I see that some of my curiosity has been quenched. It's some interesting statistical data for sure.
People need to stop calling copyright infringement Piracy... its just the wrong word to describe whats happening
What I took away from the article:
"Pirates don't stick around" - bad fathers?
"...pirates are less qualified" - bad credit?
Seriously though, if you know where all the jailbreaking phones are, why not only release games in those countries with less jailbreakers (say 10% or less)? Then, block IP's of those countries with the high jailbreakers. Sure it'd piss the pirates off in those countries, and you might lose the possibility of real customers, but you'd more likely lose more pirate bandwidth leeching. Otherwise you're like Ned Flanders giving away free parking validations at Springfield Mall.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
he explains, "because I don't believe pirates would have bought the game if they hadn't stolen it...."
Don't tell the MPAA or RIAA that.
They will get all uppity in your shit!
If an app is "over-priced" at a $1, then I think the App Store has done you a disservice in terms of the REAL value of hard work. If you think it's too expensive, and yet you still want it, I think it stands to reason that while you may not want to pay as much as they are asking for, it certainly shouldn't be free. And anyone who complains about $1 apps needs to re-evaluate their budget. If you feel even a $1 app is too much, DON'T BUY IT. But that doesn't entitle you to "trial periods", where you will have a sudden epiphany that an app is of value to you. For more expensive apps (in general, not just the app store), there are often trial versions to evaluate whether it's right for you or not. If you've never written a line of code in your life, you have absolutely NO idea how much hard work goes into an app you might think is "simple" or "not worth a dollar".
In this case, they're losing money because they have to pay for bandwidth and server resources that unpaid app users are utilizing.
What the developers should do is utilize in-app purchase capability, that produces a unique transaction id# kept on their servers for each purchase, username/password, that the developer gets associated with the unique device ID.
Cut the initial cost of the app, and charge a consumable fee.
A fee for "X hours" of app usage, which gets tracked by the server, e.g. 1000 hours of app usage.
If multiple iPhones are using the same ID# at the same time, it deducts the time associated with both sessions.
The statement means exactly what it says. 60% of apps have been pirated at least once.
So, 40% of their applications have never been pirated? Isn't that evidence of an overwhelming lack of piracy?
... and then they built the supercollider.
No, the correct word for what he's saying is 'definitively'. He is saying that it is a known absolute fact that at least 60% of the applications available on the App Store are also available in a cracked/warezed form. 'Definitive' is absolutely the correct word since Pinch Media has hard proof that this is the case. Do you have any training in editing? I do, and understanding when words should be used and when they shouldn't is part of that training.
Does pirating an iphone app require a jailbroken phone?
Yes, that is the case. So that means 2-3 million devices that can potentially pirate apps (of course not all people that jailbreak do so to pirate apps), out of a field of 30 million+ devices.
If so, does that mean the "rule" is that there are more jailbroken phone users out there using these pirated applications than there are non-jailbroken phone users using them?
Not at all. This statistic is really misleading, because they are just saying that 60% total of the apps HAVE PIRATED VERSIONS. Actually I would be really surprised if it was that low, I thought it was closer to 90% since it's easily automated - but someone has to buy the app in the first place to pirate it....
But that number says nothing at all about the number of users of any application. That number is NOT saying that 60% of the users of any given app have pirated it.
However there's even more to it that that. As I said the pirating is really easily automated, so it's not like the traditional pirating where applications are really cracked - code signing is just removed. This is actually really easy for an application developer to check for and so lots of apps now check to see (a) if they are on a jailbroken device or (b) if the app is pirated or not. Lots of developers monitor that but do nothing about it, some issue gentle notices after a few weeks saying "hey, why not buy me now". So any developer that cares about the pirating can make the job a lot harder if they really want by preventing functionality on pirated copies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's up the past few days. Stories about iPhone development sucks, Android development rules, no wait Android development sucks and iPhone development rules, no wait iPhone owners are a bunch of pirates.
What you are seeing is a battle over memespace, two sides trying to convince a technical populace that the other side sucks.
Happily slashdot readers are more savvy than this, and there are well reasoned responses in each of these articles that lay out what is going on, despite very misleading article summaries - like this story implying 60% of iPhone users pirate, when in reality it's about 5% and the 60% figure is only the percentage of apps that have pirated VERSIONS, which says nothing about number of users who are pirating any given app.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Effort does not correlate with value. I can spend thirty years building something and still end up with something worthless, and I can spend half an hour building a million dollar app. It's all about ho
How is he supposed to know if the app is expensive or not, by its name? He said he paid if he wants to use it, he'll delete it if he doesn't.
And building an app doesn't entitle the developer to expect people to buy it without ever trying it, only by name.
Well, maybe those apps should have trial versions too.
Dilbert RSS feed
I'm sure reporting greater pirating numbers is in Mr. Yardley's financial interest as well.
Actually they would be far more valuable kept private. There's no reason at all not to believe these numbers, as Pinch Media gains nothing by the numbers being higher or lower - any developer can easily add code in themselves to check if an app is pirated, so it's not like people not using Pinch Media today would be overly compelled to do so if they really wanted to check.
Don't forget this is just the number of apps that have pirated versions being used, not the number of users pirating apps or even the total percentage of pirated apps (because there could easily be many apps pirated and never run).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wait a second here..
So it's the Apple's fault that game companies can't validate customers who buy their product, against customers who use their services? Sounds like a case of short-sighted design to me.
So jailbreaking an iphone, which takes almost no technical know how is done by 10% of users and pirating apps, which takes more know how, results in 60% of games being pirated?
The thing is it's very, very easy to automate this pirating. That is to say, the supply of pirated apps is what the 60% figure comes from - 60% of apps they track have pirated versions run at one time or another.
It's not saying 60% of users are running pirated apps, or that any one app has 60% of users running a pirated version.
I would actually estimate the real number of apps that have pirated versions to be much higher, more like 90% - there are places dedicated to downloading and then readying pirated versions of app store apps. But again that doesn't mean more than 10% of iPhone owners (as you said, an estimate for jailbroken phones) are going to be able to run them, and not all those users will pirate apps 100% of the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I jailbroke my iPhone before the App Store started up. Then I un-jailbroke it. I just didn't see the need, even though it is really easy.
But I cannot figure out how to pirate anything off the App Store and I didn't know it was possible. I also don't know how anyone could subvert iTunes to steal applications for one's (or one's friends') iPhone or iPod Touch.
Now I'm not looking for anyone to list the steps to steal stuff on slashdot, but people can pirate apps from the App Store?! I thought Apple had it pretty much locked up.
The vast majority of my apps are free. I did buy two chess games and I bought a very good WiFi finder. Most of what I do on my iPhone is read news, email, Facebook and slashdot. Maybe I'm just too old to be tempted...
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Is it really so hard to google iphone app review and come up with this?
http://www.iphoneappreviews.net/
It's a buck. A cup of coffee. A quarter of a beer at a sporting event. Stop whining about it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I take it you don't know what 'sic' means.
I take it you don't realize that Serious Callers Only inserted the [sic motherfucker] into tomhudson's quote after bolding the error.
The way the numbers are reported is a bit misleading. “Of paid apps that use Pinch Media’s services, 60% have been pirated. Of those pirated apps, 34% of all installs are the pirated version.” This means that maybe only 20% of installs are pirated. Those numbers are actually really good for software.
The way the first picture is reported is also misleading. It’s titled, “Application Piracy is Global” and then it shows a graph of jailbroken iphones. Jailbreaking is not the same as pirating. Jailbreaking is what you need to unbind an iphone from the app store, and the first step to unlocking an iphone. Since iPhones are were not sold in China until just recently, almost all their iPhones have to be imported from other carriers, so it is no surprise that an abnormally high percentage in China are jailbroken.
Judging from the graph, it appears that roughly 10-15% of all iphones have been jailbroken. “About 38% [of jailbroken iphones] have used a pirated application.” “34% of all installs are cracked” This means that roughly 4-6% of iphone users have ever used a pirated application. And yet somehow, those 4-6% of iphones account for 34% of all installs? I’m a bit skeptical.
“Pirated apps on jailbroken iPhones crash more, which may be why they’re used less.” I’m really skeptical about this interpretation. That graph is really really zoomed in. Crash rates for pirated applications appear to crash only 0.5%-1.3% more sessions than a regular app. That’s fairly rare. That’s like one in every 80 to 200 sessions results in an “extra” crash.
This blog post is either really poorly written or the author has an intentional bias that they want to express.
On a related note, I hope this gets more app developers to make “lite” versions of their software so people can try them out. The conversion numbers are much better than the alternative.
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#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
"Overpriced to begin with? Rubbish. They cost loads less than on any competing platform"
That's not the issue, games themselves are now WAY WAY over produced so their value to people is nil. Most iPhone games are rehashes of old games and are absolute junk, I'm not surprised no one wants to pay money for a phone game. Most people have systems dedicated to gaming for just this purpose.
iPhone games = flash games, this is why many flash games are run on portals for the ad revenue. IMHO that's the model iPhone games are under and quite frankly we already have tonnes of casual flash games and casual games portals.
There is just way too much oversupply in games and I think most developers need their heads read, you're competing against ALL OTHER possible games, why would someone waste their finite money on a dinky little iPhone game and not Modern warfare 2, or left for dead 2?
The question should be, then, whether the availability and ease of piracy takes customers, who would otherwise buy the game, away.
I agree, and I think the answer is no.
I used to pirate stuff really heavily in college. Now that I can afford things, I buy them (when it is possible to buy anything).
Out of all of the people pirating applications and games, on any platform, 90% of them have been the same. When people are pirating they are usually in packrat mode, simply gathering stuff just to have it. But it doesn't mean any sales have been lost.
So I don't think any software industry is losing more than a few percent of real sales to piracy. That I think is also why app developer responses to piracy have been so mellow, where they could be doing a lot more evil stuff to people running pirated versions of apps they are not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The code to tell if your application has been pirated or not is trivial, because pirating is basically just taking away the code signing which is easy to examine from the application. So it's very easy to get a clear picture of an app running because it has been pirated vs. is simply running on another device that iTunes has enabled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, wait a second
- In order to pirate an iphone app, you have to jailbreak your phone. Only a small percentage of the user base have done this
- By measuring the total number of "phone homes", you can figure out how many copies of your app are out in the wild, INCLUDING copies on jailbroken phones.
So if you find out that your app has 1000 copies in the wild.
600 of those copies are on the jailbroken iphones that make up maybe 5% of the total phones.
Therefore, you're out the revenue from those 600 copies? Nope, because if those users hadn't hacked their phones, they probably WOULD NOT have paid for your app. The reason you only have 400 sales in this scenario is that the 95% of users who are eligible to buy it weren't interested enough in your app. The jailbreaking users just grab whatever they want whenever they want, but wouldn't behave like that if they had to pay.
There's an app for that.
While it's impossible to estimate how much money developers are losing....
You can't lose money you never made. If you're not making money you think you ought to then that is a flaw in your business plan
Saw a similar 'study' a few weeks ago.
This sounds like a shocking figure, but don't forget, it doesn't mean that over 60% have managed to jailbreak their phones and have manually added the pirate repository and bypassed the morality message. That would be silly.
People who are heavily into pirating tend to download everything they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter that they won't touch 99% of of it and will just store gigabytes of it on their hard drives and DVD-Rs - that's the point. It's like a game, and many of the hardcore piracy types (no porn jokes!) seem to download *.*
I don't mean to be rude about the game or the author, but if this shared "pool" of hardcore iPhone pirates is 1000 for example, then 1000 people will download _every game in existence_ on the iPhone. If it's a crap game that only 100 people bothered to buy, (1100 total users) then it's over 90% pirated. OTOH some great top-30 game might have had 90000 buyers (plus the 1000 pirates, making 91000 users), in which case it's 1.1% pirated. Either way, it's one static pool of people who have removed themselves from the entire market, and doesn't mean that CrapGameCo has lost 91% of its profit, no matter how shocking their piracy-detecting scoreboard looks.
That's my theory anyway - no data to back it up, just logic really IMO.
Actually, I think that comes to about one third of the 60%, meaning that 20% of all the installs of apps that use Pinch are pirated. I assume that Pinch charges for its library, so they would likely be tracking few, if any, free apps. They may be in some low-priced apps, but probably not that many of those, either. So that 20% may well amount to something like 1% or fewer of all installs. On my phone, free or 99-cent apps comprise roughly 95% of the installed base; I know of only one that uses Pinch (out of 91 installed over the included apps).
It's also very unlikely that many free apps are pirated. The Gamasutra article suggests that low-priced apps are also pirated, but that article contains only anecdotes, no numbers. Probably not many 99-cent apps either. So his 34% of 60% is likely to be a rather small number by this analysis as well.
Looking at it another way, let's take the only real numbers that they give: 38% of the four million jailbroken phones have used a pirated app - about a milllion and a half. Assuming that you need a jailbroken phone to run pirated apps, about 15% of extant iPhones can do so. Roughly 5% actually do. So 95% of iPhones do not run pirated apps. Both articles assert that the vast majority of pirated apps are by users who would not buy the application from the app store. I'd have to conclude that piracy is not a significant problem on the iPhone.
Looking at the developer who said that 96% of his users were pirate installs, the game is either overpriced, uninteresting. or hard to find in the app store. At $6.99, I'm very unlikely to buy any application - especially one that sounds like a storybook for kids. On the other hand, I just paid significantly more than that for an edition of the (concise) OED for my phone. Of course, it's probably close to the cheapest edition of it that one can buy... In any case, given the "pirates wouldn't buy anyway" principle, app store sales are a 95% accurate indicator of the popularity of your application.
The bottom line is that the numbers that he gives are purely a PR exercise, designed to fuel indignation and scare developers into thinking that their work will be stolen. And incidentally to boost sales for Pinch Media. They do sell a decent library, from what I have read, and the monitoring feature is a valuable capability. But scare tactics, however well-established a strategy in the security industry, tend to work mostly on the uninformed.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Why would a comment have an editor?
My friend developed a game for the iPhone and has seen miniscule sales but lots of pirated copies being played. The problem seems to be that there is no way to find good apps on the App Store, popular apps rise to the top and it's impossible to find good stuff unless you know what you're looking for. He has decided to make it free for a week and already it has climbed higher in the charts, the only way to make money off this seems to be either to release it free with ads or get it in the top 50 where people will buy it even if it's crap.
His game is rather good btw, "seaglass" for those that want to check it out, free for one week only :)
Who are you to say that if I want to game that I need to be playing Call of Duty? What if I hate consoles? I do hate consoles, and I do 100% of my gaming right now on my Iphone 3gs! I love the games that are out for it. I think you are stupid to suggest people don't want to game on the Iphone!
Or it just so happens that 40% of the applications are more or less crap.
;)
That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
It's hogwash, of course. They would not get money from those people if they had, therefore they are not losing money. And it's beside the point. Are they making money? Be glad the majority don' jailbreak. Otherwise, they'd be out of business. Just keep making the best games you can, and you'll be rewarded. No use crying over something you wouldn't have anyway.
I would not pirate an app for my iPhone or any machine I own.
I have a lot of friends and co-workers with iPhones and I don't think a single one of them has a jailbroken device OR any pirated apps. Considering a fair amount of them (and myself) have the technical ability to do so, I wonder about the "rule", regardless of whether they're Pinch-based apps or not.
And honestly, most of the apps are so cheap that anyone and everyone should just pay the $2. I bought RedLaser for $1.99 a while back and saved far more than that shopping with it the first weekend. Bought Pocket Universe for $2.99 last week and have certainly gotten more than 3 bucks of enjoyment from it.
Pirates...whether they're stealing apps or cargo ships...are the lowest form of life.
I am my own gestalt.
I won't subscribe to cable TV, but I will watch it if I can steal it. Stupid argument, assholes. The only difference is you likely won't get caught stealing software or music or movies, but likely will if you steal cable TV. You are just a bunch of sorry ass whining assholes, that's all. I'd kick your ass but seeing as how you are all asshole, that's more than I can do.
My 3 year old son urges me to download games on the iPhone. I get all the free ones listed for each category and listed under "most popular." He and I agree that 99% of the games we see are some of the worst crap you can imagine. There are a few types:
* Stuff that requires a lot of downloading, rendering, entering passwords, connecting to various multiplayer networks, answering their questions, etc. It takes 5 minutes before the game starts, but by then, we've both lost patience.
* The games are obnoxiously crippled -- they offer only teases, or they constantly try to trick you into clicking to their ordering system, or their ads, or they suddenly stop in the middle of play. You feel interrupted, short-changed, and ripped off.
* The games themselves strike us as weirdly unimaginative. The graphics are retreds of crap I've been seeing since the 80s, or else they look like the standard manga stuff. They often have cliched, muzak-style "soundtracks" and have the game equivalents of a laugh-track: clapping, "awww"-ing, etc.
In sum: these games suck. How they can represent some sort of billion-dollar-industry is so baffling that I suspect a hyped bubble; I can't imagine masses of people paying for this junk. It's more fun to kill time by flipping a coin. It feels like there are no original artists in the game-making work, just "industry" hacks. Maybe one day game-making will somehow be more democratic like website creation and some will try to innovate.
The problem is that "micro-transactions" have crept into every aspect of life.
If take the time to add up all your "buck here, buck there" transactions, you may be surprised just how much you spend.
The entire system is set up to maximize impulse buys and hide the total cost of purchases by splitting it up into bits.
People go for free because it is less than $1 or 25 cents or even 1 cent. Isn't it exactly that fact why so many things are outsourced to China, India, etc? To save just a little bit on each transaction?
It's real just the whole "pot meet kettle" issue. Everybody will go will spending as little as they can. The only difference is that businesses have an easier time making their cost cutting measures legal and those of individuals illegal, and then trying to use words like "intellectual property" and "piracy" to give a moralistic tone to the debate along with their stacked legal deck.
It's a bunch of dishonesty, ultimately, and it's obvious that lots normal people aren't convinced that this "priracy" is so terrible.. Nor should they be.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Without some sort of information about the popularity of each app, it is really tough to combine the 60% and 34% in a meaningful way (for instance, it is at least possible for a single one of the 40% apps to have more individual installations than the entire 60%, or popular apps may be pirated at much higher rates, or whatever).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I think it's more jailbroken ipod touches than phones. My nephews indicate that jailbroken (correct word?) ipod touches are very common among the grade school set, and their ipods were chock full of games they downloaded for free...
the developer is grossly over-estimating the value of their software, thinking "If my software isn't great, then why would anyone pirate it?"
I once worked for a small company with a semi-popular application. Sales were almost all of the form of pay pal purchases off the website. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to pay one developer. But piracy was a huge problem. It was quite obvious that more than 90% of the copies running were pirated.
The company changed directions and started bundling the application for free with online services. The service provider would pay for the application and the customers would get the software for use only with the service. But the company was worried about piracy, so they asked me to write DRM that tied the application to the service. They would continue to sell an untied version off the website, but with "call home" DRM (it's an internet app, so it's not quite as draconian as it sounds). I very reluctantly agreed (i.e., I had to decide whether it was worth quitting over -- if I had to do it again, I'd quit).
The end result was that all piracy stopped. In fact, all usage stopped. Instead of selling 2 or 3 copies a day off the website, not one copy of the DRM version was ever sold. And due to very poor choices of service provider partners, the company received no revenue at all. Within a year the company had folded.
The thing is, the new version was head and shoulders better than then non-DRMed version. And the DRM was truly unobtrusive (think DRM in WoW). Paying customers wouldn't even know it existed. But sales are generated by popularity, not quality. Piracy, like it or not generates popularity. The company was very small and had no means of effective advertising. By cutting off the pirates, they shut off their only revenue source.
What always kills me about this story is this: The app we were making was *perfect* for an open software model. Ask the service providers to each spend a small amount of money to cover development and give them the app for free. Give them branding in the app to thank them for their help. But the "sales" people were always quick to point out that the service providers they found had no money and couldn't afford to pay us up front. How on earth did we fail? :-P
Apple locked the phone to AT&T and locked it internationally as well.
This created the conditions for a large black market to flourish both within the US and Internationally.
You will find iPhones in every country of the world, whether they have agreements with Apple or not.
Within this black market, you have the Pirating of games and other content. Of course, if people have the phones but cannot purchase the content, they're going to pirate it. One can argue till blue in the face about the legality and morality of it, that's what people are going to do.
There need to be numbers released as to the demographics of the users of these Pirated applications. Do they all have legitimate iPhones in countries that support the iPhones application store?
Can they purchase these products if they wanted to at equal cost?
-Gel214th
I encourage would-be-pirates people to simply write it themselves.
The same could be said about music, but that doesn't go over so well :)
With software, United States case law recognizes methods of "reverse engineering", or copying only the (uncopyrightable) functionality of a program without copying the (copyrighted) expression of the program. Music and other non-software works don't have a corresponding exception; even if you "write it yourself", you might still infringe. George Harrison found out about this the hard way when he wrote a song only to learn later that he would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to someone else who had written the same song years earlier (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).
You could allso ask yourself, How do they know ?
A real pirate won't accept his credentials being transmitted to whomever he pirated (unless he aims to do a joe-job). This means there are only a few other possibilities they got this number from : guesstimates (would not surprise me) or the creator of the app (or someone else) having the app phone-home without the users consent and/or knowledge (would not surprise me either).
In other words : who's the pirate here ? The (assumed) illegal copier, or the creator/other person who intrudes on any/every persons privacy, hoping to catch an offender ?
And if you answer "both", do two wrongs make a right ? If that is so than my "stealing" of a product of a company that rips both buyers as well as the producers of it (hint: music) is not wrong either ?
A fee for "X hours" of app usage, which gets tracked by the server, e.g. 1000 hours of app usage.
How can the server track an iPhone or iPod Touch device using the app in airplane mode? If your app refuses to run in airplane mode, and its normal operation wouldn't reasonably need a constant connection to the Internet, you risk drawing undesirable comparisons to Valve's Steam authentication.
Does this mean apps instrumented with Pinch are easier to pirate? How could that be?
The reason is, of course, that Slashdotters, as a general rule, understand what goes into programming an application. We have empathy and respect for programmers for the simple reason that for some of us, it's our profession.
Not so much with musicians. We (again -- as a general rule) characterize them as untalented and spoiled. Some people are more equal than others, and in the eyes of many Slashdotters, musicians are the least equal of all.
We don't pirate applications because we respect the work that programmers perform. However, we elevate music piracy to a social cause worthy of Rosa Parks. Hurting musicians? No -- we're putting them in their place. They should get a day job! They should make a living selling t-shirts! They should just stop being so greedy! We deserve to use modern technology to copy their work, but how dare they try to use modern technology to make a living?
And if that's not enough of a rationalization of music piracy, we're eager to suggest others. Just watch.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Yes, quite true. Those numbers are pretty much divorced from reality. I'd guess an inverse relation between price and installed base, most likely, but that doesn't really give much to reason with. Too many uncertainties.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
A product is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. This is how "supply and demand" works. If the consumers are telling you it's overpriced rather than buying it, then it is overpriced. If you paid too much in developing software that's deemed overpriced by your customer base, you can hardly blame the consumer for that. You simply over-invested in a failed project.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Ok, this actually makes sense to me. Even if the app can identify itself as legitimate or pirated in a server/client setting, even the bandwidth used for verification of each copy of the app alone would eventually add up.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Or it just so happens that 40% of the applications are more or less crap.
That seems like an extremely low estimate, I would have thought at least 90% of applications are crap. Anyway, how would a "pirate" know without pirating it first? In the PC world, everything gets pirated, whether crap or not.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Look, I and almost ALL of my friends have iPhones. We're all geeks and I think almost all of us have jailbroken our phones at least once and I for one have kept up and stayed jailbroken since the very beginning. We're not the sort who wouldn't pirate an app or two, if nothing just to try it out, but so far as I know NONE of us have. Apparently it's not very hard, I've heard there are torrents out there full of them, but come on - for .99 why bother? Hell I even bought the Navigon mapping app for full price and THAT stung! But pirating never crossed my mind and I know that the two other friends of mine that have it have paid for it too. If the rate of pirating were really as high as 60% then I'm pretty sure my friends would be chattering about it quite a bit or at least asking me about it. I will admit that with all of this talk about it I'm tempted to go learn more about how to do it and maybe try an app or two but most games these days have a trial version and that has satisfied me. This isn't like PC games that often turn out to be crap and if you watch the store you can often find apps on sale - wish there was an app to tell me about THAT! It's like MP3s, I used to pirate the heck out of them and had ripped ALL of my friends CDs and vice versa. I refused to buy anything DRM'd! Now I use Shazam to pickup on any songs I like and then about once every couple of weeks I sit down and download all the ones I like from Amazon at a buck apiece. At THAT price with no DRM it's simply not worth my while to ask around to find out who has the song and it feels good to not download it from some cheezy torrent. I might even buy a used CD once in awhile too but sorry no new ones RIAA.
So, I'm sort of the demographic that would consider this and frankly I've just not been tempted and I don't think any of the ten+ iPhone owners I know have been either. I think these guys may be pushing an agenda here, maybe next week they will release an app designed to halt this. I wouldn't be surprised one bit if that's what this was about....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Seeing as how you can only pirate an application if you have a jailbroken iPhone, why not implement a feature that nags the heck out of the pirate? I think it is fairly safe to say that most people with jailbroken iPhones have left the default root password in place, it should be possible to place a nice gigantic message on their lock screen, or even change their wallpaper to something less than glamorous. Make it inconvenient.
Here I will play your typical Slashtard response...
"what do you work for the RIAA you corporate whore!"
*head spinning* with +5 Hypocrites
Go make the movie yourselves if you think the movie industry is that awful to you.
Maybe places like Sweden where piracy laws are lax they should work on improving their own film industry and stop sucking off the tit of the American/British creativity.
More like a bunch of materialistic bitches, get some priorities in life besides being a leech.
Yes. People hear the kids practicing in the garage next door and think "music is easy." No, it isn't. If it were, everyone would make it. It's extremely time-consuming, laborious, and expensive. It is no different from software.
1 piracy doesn't even come close to 1 lost sale, but it absolutely means lost revenue to someone. imagine if piracy wasn't possible and didn't exist. all of the millions of people playing pirated games, listening to pirated music, watching pirated movies, would have to do something: buy a game, buy a movie, buy a cd, buy a book, buy a pen and paper to write novel. even if they did supposedly free things such as watch broadcast tv or walk in the park they are still consuming rather than stealing. (using a tv, using sneakers/food/calories) the point is they are not because they have stolen. people who think piracy doesn't mean lost sales are ignorant, sure they may not mean lost sales to the pirated app, but they sure as hell are lost sales to someone.
I think it's a meaningless statistic.
If an app is popular enough, and there are people who pirate apps, then there's a higher probability of one of the persons who pirates apps finding that particular app and not wanting to pay for it.
With high probability, at least 1 person would pirate each of the most popular apps they instrument, and they'd detect it.
I totally agree. I won't lose any sleep over a $2 purchase. But at some point beyond that, there are a great number of apps which really should offer a trial period or lite version so you know what in the world you're buying before you purchase it. Too often all you get are some screenshots and a vague description, and I don't want to have to spend an hour Googling it.
That's not a defense of stealing it! Just a suggestion that the existing process -- which works pretty well -- has room for improvement.
...that people are willing to pay a minimum of $60/month for iPhone service and $100 on the hardware itself (and on average quite a lot more than this!), yet are pirating games and apps worth, what, $2?
*facepalm*
I don't get it. Pirating movies and music, at least, I get. An album or movie is usually at least $10. And the replay value is not as high as a game--you saw it or listened to it, okay, that's everything to the content. A game, IMO, has more lasting entertainment value (provided it's a good one) than even the best movies. And I'm not even a "gamer." (Would you believe I've never owned a game console of any sort?)
$1440 minimum for the 2-year iPhone contract, plus the hardware cost...apps are puny in comparison. Heck, I spend more on gasoline in one month than I've spent on all my iPhone apps ever since iPhone apps existed. Sure, I suppose there are people out there who want tons of apps, but seriously, I went through the store. There really wasn't all that much to be had at any price, including free. The truth is, the vast, vast majority of apps are crap.
If they're just counting installs vs. revenue then they are mistaken. I bought an app for $6.99 last year and end up having to go to the store and through the motions of buying it every time I update the iPhone to get it back. There is no charge, but I get a receipt for $0.00 everytime
I think you're confusing "recording "artists"" with musicians. To be a real musician takes a good bit of talent and a whole lot of practice, and I think you'll find that there are more slashdotters and other technical people who are also musicians as well and who will find some sympathy for musicians who actually deserve the title.
;-)
Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, B.B. King, Jimmie Page -- just to name a few popular people who deserve to actually be called musicians -- are markedly different than the slutty little panty flashers and boys in girls pants that get pimped by the recording studios, but to whom no one wants to listen, and thus it can't possibly be that the product sucks... nope -- PIRACY is responsible for the decline in revenue.
I understand your post was probably tongue-in-cheek, but still, I think a Beethoven or a Wagner is every bit a master of craft as a Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie, and perhaps more so. Computer Scientists can only need to count by 1s and 2s... musicians have to work in multiples of 5 and 8 as well. C# and F# were music notes, first, lest we forget
And of course this all has a Streisand Effect to it.
I literally had never pirated an app from my Jailbroken since day one 2G iphone until a Slashdot story a few weeks ago told me how easy it was courtesy of appulo.us et al.
After going on an utter bonanza of "Yarrr prepare to be boarded - your booty be mine for the plunderin!" the only pirated app (out of.... 43 that I downloaded, just checked) is Wolfram Alpha ($50 for a web front end?!) and NBA Season Pass which now doesnt work since I moved back to China and would have made me LIVID had I paid the $60 for it only to be "Blacked Out Due To Location" a week later. Oddly enough though I can still watch their highlight reels....
The other ones (Brian Eno apps, some lame ass meteor game) were shareware at best anyways. I paid for Scrabble, I paid for my Chinese dictionary. Quit bitchin.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, B.B. King, Jimmie Page -- just to name a few popular people who deserve to actually be called musicians -- are markedly different than the slutty little panty flashers and boys in girls pants that get pimped by the recording studios
So there are no songwriters, instrumentalists, or producers involved in any of Britney Spears's records? They just somehow appear from the ether through the evil powers of the record companies?
Did you not read the parent (great-grandparent to this post)?
It was a spelling flame that used sic in the title, but the wrong word in the post. I don't think anyone here is confused about what sic means.
There are a lot of applications which, as much as I love them, aren't worth $1 to me. F/OSS software is the example and solution. Because it is Free, I can install it on as many computers as I like - and I never have to worry about licensing, payment, how to download, etc. In contrast, for a paid application (even a $1 one) I need to figure out how to securely buy it, to buy additional copies when I install it on other computers, where I put the installation media (because companies usually don't say sure - here's another copy if you lost yours) etc. Even "streamlined" systems like iTunes, which try to solve the micropayment problem, just don't match the convenience of using F/OSS code, Not to mention that while 1 app is cheap, the total of all the apps you install is not. (Consider all the applications that used to be shareware on Windows/Mac which are now available as F/OSS: image viewer, picture editor (gimp), mp3 player, zip program, ssh, ftp, etc).
But some of what developers seem to like about Apple products is just that - the market that buys from Apple seems to be happy to pay for things that the rest of us have found we can already get for free as F/OSS. It's ... a different mindset, I guess. But it doesn't seem to change what software is developed, at the end of the day. I can't think of an example where there is a piece of "paid" software without a Free alternative (short of some particular, specialized packages), or a piece of Free software without a "paid" alternative.
Of course, if TFA doesn't say who's in the wrong context then he's just being a smartass.
I think you mean whose in the wrong context.
Motherfucker!
Either I can't figure out this new comment display system, or you're replying to a guy who inserted "[sic]" telling him why one would insert "[sic]" in a quote.
Don't conflate the issue of whether the price is fair with the issue of whether a free trial is necessary.
I will agree with you that $1 is a ridiculously low price for a software application, and someone unwilling to pay that much should just not use the app.
The problem is that when producers get paid in full every time a consumer evaluates the product and decides it is unusable, they start creating products that look just good enough to try out, but don't actually work. The revenues are the same, and the margins are better.
I simply won't pay for software until I have finished evaluating it, no matter what the price. Many times, that means that I walk away from good products that I can't get for evaluation. Too bad for them.
As a professional software developer, I understand just how much goes into creating an application. I also understand that the difference between an excellent application and a useless one can be as small as one line of code.
http://xkcd.com/756//
Piracy is so high because there is no trialware software, try before you buy. therefore why spend $6.99 on a program you dont even know is that good? its easier to download an app and apply it on a jailbroken phone and try it to see how good it is, but then they leave it on the phone because they "unconsciously" feel because the company didnt offer a trial they dont deserve your money. and if it turns out to be crap software people just delete it and not feel like they wasted $6.99 Note to Apple: Encourage Trialware, your software quality will go up because people wont buy crap.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
Does pirating an iphone app require a jailbroken phone?
Probably.
If so, does that mean the "rule" is that there are more jailbroken phone users out there using these pirated applications than there are non-jailbroken phone users using them?
Unlikely. Pirates are likely to have more software. When it's free people are more likely to acquire a piece of software.
Doesn't that essentially indicate the apps are overpriced to begin with?
Ovepriced is highly subjective. Some people absolutely need certain software. They'd pay far more than the price if they had to. Others don't need it so much but find it useful if it's free. Most people are between these two extremes. The correct price is the one that maximise the product of units sold and per-unit profit.
90% of everything is crap. Sturgeons law applies to iPhone apps as well.
Dont you go bringing your rational well thought out posts to this thread mate.
It's an iphone thread on Slashdot, that sort of thing is just not done here.
(-:
As a game developer, with 6 games in the appstore, we also had some exposure to this issue. Our first major game was a multiplayer pool game (Earl Strickland or Steve Davis) where matchmaking was provided by our own servers, nothing really sophisticated, it just acted as a relay. While i am not saying that one pirated copy is one lost sale, but the first couple hundred games played online was done using a pirated copy, and we haven't seen a single legitimate in the first 2-3 days after release. And there was a free demo... Technically, detecting a pirated copy is still very easy, the "cracking" just removes the entitlements from the plist, so we knew the device id, the only thing we had to do is just do something about it... The reason we choose to do nothing was the prospect of something going wrong for a legitimate user... After all sales were not that bad, one of our games made it to the UK top 10, but the company has folded by then. I guess that says pretty much about how much profit we made... In real life the story is a bit different from the one Apple tells you - your game will only sell well (10K units+) if it is featured, and you have to pay up for that... Do some calculations, do release a professional quality game, you need a coder or an artist for 2-3 months (if they are exceptional, and you are either one of them) or more if they are average, which (in the UK) will cost you like 2K GBP per month (cheap), ignore the cost of software, office space, etc... so you have make at least say 5K on your game. Assuming 1 GBP per game (70% stays with the developer), that makes perfectly clear how many units you have to sell to make it even. Good enough for the bedroom coder, but for a professional there is a lot more money to make elsewhere. That pretty much explains the average quality of games on the iPhone, IMHO.
You would be right... if you weren't entirely wrong.
What is happening with music is that we don't believe that *Recording Executives* deserve to make $12 profit off of a crappy 4 song album.
I don't believe anybody really believes in screwing over the artists, (well except for the Recording Executives who DO screw them over.)
however, it does set a bad precedent with the general population when we go "It's ok to steal music, you're sticking it to the man!" Because the general population figures apps and everything digital is just like music...
And anyone who complains about $1 apps needs to re-evaluate their budget
Like, where does a $400 phone (plus contract) fit into your budget when you can't afford $1 for an App.
That part is true.
I play the Guitar and most people who actually care about music do not manage to make it anywhere as the industry is set up to support generic factory produced music, not anything that is actually created. Instead of going to the latest Shitney Spears concert, try finding a local bar that has a live Jazz or Rock band playing and you will quickly notice the difference, granted these places are not that easy to find these days.
It's unfortunate that the truly talented musicians are giving lessons and performing at parties for less then A$500 a night.
OTOH, I've met developers that have such an entitlement complex they would make most pop stars look like Mother Theresa, this is not the rule but there are an inordinate amount of dev's who think because they've put out a crappy program they deserve to get paid and paid well for it. Often this is expressed in anti-piracy rants that ignores the fact that people are not forced to buy their products and often don't as their offering doesn't have enough value to the price they are asking for it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Music is easy, good music is not, same with software.
You're app really isn't that good. Piracy really isn't as big as you'd like to think it is.
I too am a developer.
I've worked on one particular app now for 7 years, there are probably 50-60k legitimate sales of the app over its lifespan. Not a huge number by any means, but if there have been 1k pirated copies installed over its entire life I would be shocked. Our app doesnt' call home, but if you use it, you're going to connect to one of a handful of sites at some point that we can identify a unique copy. We've worked with those sites to get real numbers about piracy, it happens, but its so incredibly rare that it would be a complete waste of time to even bother trying to figure out who does it, let alone do anything about the fact that they pirate it.
I call bullshit on anyone who claims 90% of the running copies were pirated, that is unless maybe you've 'cracked' your own software and given it to 9 friends, and count yourself as the 10th user and the only legitimate one. Or was it something like 'if you continue using this software, send $10 to this paypal account'? If you put any effort at all into stopping free loaders you won't see 90% from anyone, thats just not realistic and is unbelievable to say the least. Enough people are honest enough that even with no protection at all, you'll not hit that rate of piracy. Are you selling GPL'd software or something and count every instance that you didn't sell as a pirated copy? Hell, Redhat probably couldn't hit a 90% rate if they counted every freely downloaded copy of Fedora as a pirated copy. Okay, thats not true either, but really, 90%, no way.
I don't have to know anything about your app to know you're numbers are either complete made up bullshit or made up.
Do you work for the BSA or something?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well, I think a possible explanation is
> Sales were almost all of the form of pay pal purchases off the website.
From the people I know if paypal is the only payment method you offer there might be a lot of people who wouldn't pay even if it cost only $0.01, because simply using paypal is considered too high a cost.
maybe time for some self-reflection by pirates too? You people can afford one of the most expensive phones on the market, but resent paying a software developer 99 cents for his work?
How sad to be so incredibly tight-fisted and selfish...
Or that 40% of applications are garbage and pirates aren't even willing to take them for free?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Most programmers are paid a fixed wage, and work 9-5 in the back end churning out code... Unlike the big name musicians, and more like the backend workers who do all the hard work making a big name singer sound good, trying to make their singing in tune with the instruments and then pressing it all to a cd.
You don't get celebrity programmers on tv being paid millions for trivial appearances, and most programmers will not continue seeing any money once they stop actively writing code.
Being paid a reasonable wage for a reasonable amount of work is one thing, being paid huge amounts of money for work you haven't even done recently is quite another.
Software companies make millions off the hard work of their programmers, and they don't get an ongoing percentage of sales. If that programmer leaves, they stop getting anything at all but the company continues to make millions from the work they did.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Well, Android is no better, or even worse.
Almost every commercial Android application gets immediately cracked. Anyone can freely download them from links posted on public forums you can find with a simple Google search. And as far as I understand, there's even no need to jailbreak the device in order to install Android cracked software.
This is really bad for developers and I really hope that eventually, Apple and Google will find a solution to prevent this.
{{.sig}}
Software is not hugely different to music, it is often priced such that the initial development costs are paid off very quickly, leaving pure profit afterwards... And the company will make millions while whoever did the hard work of writing the software will just get their 9-5 wage, and quite possibly be fired once the software is finished so the company can go on selling it and make more money.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Trust me: nobody cares about your children. That is because they are your children.
I fixed your sig there. It had an issue with causation.
Doesn't mean that they won't be pirated. The last set of iPhone piracy statistics we saw showed that pirates installed ten times as many games as non-pirates. I assumed that meant that the pirates downloaded the crap (because it didn't cost them anything), tried it once, and then moved on, while people who actually paid for stuff tried to avoid the crap (because it cost them money).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Whether you can afford $1 is not the same as whether something is worth $1. Would you pay $1 for me to come and punch you in the face? The amount of effort involved for me to find out where you are, get there, and punch you in the face is a lot greater than $1. The $1 cost to you is not much. But I'd be quite surprised if you actually wanted to pay me $1 to punch you in the face.
The question of worth is whether that $1 could improve your life more if spent on something else. Will your life be better if you buy a cup of coffee, or if you pay me to punch you in the face? Will it be better if you buy a cup of coffee or a $1 iPhone app. More importantly, will your life be better if you buy a $1 iPhone app, or a very similar $1 iPhone app with more features and a better UI?
There are lots of things that I can afford but choose not to buy. It doesn't mean that no effort went into producing them, it means that their value to me is lower than their cost.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I call bullshit on anyone who claims 90% of the running copies were pirated,
You should look at the percentage of people who pirate (or don't pay for, while using it) WinRar or WinZip...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
No, I just meant that they really only have information about the apps they work with, but the summary generalizes that information to be about all iPhone apps. It could easily be the case that their data is representative, but it may not be the case either.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The parent raises the perfectly innocent point, does it require jailbreaking? Mods are on crack again.
So 62% of jailbreakers don't pirate software, and this makes it the rule rather than the exception? My arse it does.
If I try to write it myself, it costs £100 to get the SDK and way too much effort to get it approved...
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
First -- I have no idea how you even pirate an iPhone application ... do you just copy the binary out of the iTunes folder? Is it not digitally signed?
Second -- Why would you pirate something costing so little?
Third -- imagine the press Apple will get if they have ever tighter control! Right now bloggers and whiners garner a lot of attention when they complain about big old evil Apple Inc. and the App Store. And these complaints lead to a false hypothesis that the ship is sinking and developers are leaving in droves! All based on a developer leaving a development team at a company and making some public statements, and, a few other developers making public statements after their app is rejected from the AppStore. Apple even seems to communicate to them as to why yet they still stand slack jawed. Just imagine if Apple did something mean to pirates.
Name the app or it didn't happen.
Uhh.. do you have any idea how many people own a musical instrument? How many people sing? I don't think I'm over-estimating when I say that it's likely that more than half of the world "makes music" in one form or another. Sure, most don't record albums, but most people who can cook don't become chef's either..
MABASPLOOM!
I bet you proof read your own comment a few times before posting just to make sure you didn't get caught the way you caught him... ;)
MABASPLOOM!
i read this as a request for info, but obviously the modders see it as an offensive declarative:-(
ltfu...
So when a construction worker builds a toll road he should continue to get paid from that roads profits from now into the indefinite future? There is nothing wrong with getting paid to do a job and when you're finished the payment ends. Keep in mind that whoever paid you fronted the risk involved if the software they had you write was a complete failure in the marketplace. Would give all your salary back if it failed to sell?
Reviews at iphoneappreviews.net : 493
Apps at App Store: 30 000
Sure, one app. If you have to buy three or four of the same type 'till you find a good one, and you need ten apps, that's 20-30$ wasted. Publishers have an alternative: provide trials. It's a piece of cake to make a trial version, so they don't have any reason not do so besides greed, exploiting the people who try to follow the rules. Fuck them.
Dilbert RSS feed
I am the author of several iPhone applications, two of them access an online documentation. So basically every time somebody reads the in-app help it shows up in my webserver's statistics. A few months ago I released Xewton Music Studio, an app for composing and performing music, which my team and I have spent over one year to develop. In the first week the help loads were pretty much what I expected from the number of copies sold. But as soon as this app appeared on ***** (various file hosting websites) the help loads exploded! From my personal experience I bet that at least 90% of the users of my apps have indeed a pirated version. I understand of course that a pirated copy is not always a lost "sale", but the sales dropped immediately after the pirated versions showed up on the web. It's a pity that Apple seems to have little interest in preventing piracy on the iPhone.
That was a pretty chickenshit way to excuse yourself out of pirating and the Rosa Parks cause reference I am sure would more than make the African American crowd happy.
" Hurting musicians? No -- we're putting them in their place."
Same could be said about programmers whose jobs are being taken by somebody willing to work for pennies and working in a dead end industry.
Programmers are generally lazy, sit on their asses all day long with higher diabetes rates than most others. Maybe if they would quit being so lazy and put some more effort into their work we would be willing to pay for it.
Yeah, sounds pretty lame when you call people greedy as an excuse.
"we're eager to suggest others. Just watch."
Oh no, more crappy Indie music/movies that are unbearable to listen to.
I'm watching.... but all I see is a bunch of lazy asses on Piratebay downloading and being the general materialistic bitches that they are.
If you were only selling 2-3 copies of the app per day, honestly it could have been anything that made the company fold. There are plenty of anecdotes from larger companies where even quite weak copy protection increased sales.
It's unfortunate that the truly talented musicians are giving lessons and performing at parties for less then A$500 a night.
The problem there isn't that those musicians are underpaid. $500 a night for 5 hours of work and maybe 20 hours of practice, a week, is entirely reasonable. Plenty of us make half that for an actual 40 hour week.
I'm not trying to compare the hours worked, musicians usually can't work 'more' and hence a couple of hours a week of performance does need to pay for their living expensive, but the numbers you just mentioned are fine, at least if they can pull $500 every week, or even every other week.
They only seem bad when you compare them to the absurdly overpaid famous 'musicians', many of whom are not musicians at all.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
A$20 an hour may seem reasonable. That's A$20 an hour or judging by a 40 hour week and 48 week year (standard here in AU) thats A$38,000 which is not a good wage but not a bad wage for a 20 to 25 year old.
The problem is that you need 1.6 acts per week to get that and that it takes more then 20 hours of practice to be performance ready. You're also not counting equipment which is per person A$1500 for a cheap performance grade guitar and A$1000 for a cheap performance grade amplifier.
The point I was trying to make is that the people who play local gigs and teach music locally do it because they love to do it (much like OSS dev's) but the music industry only attracts those who want money, not the love of music. OK a bit OTT but tell me it's not true.
Every musician who does gigs for A$500 also has a full time job, normally not a good one like IT but stuff like retail or teaching with pays less then A$20 an hour (minimum wage is under A$15 an hour).
This is a good point, both of them which is why I said it's unfortunate. Good musicians get passed over, make up and plastic surgery gets plastered all over the telly.
As a side note, assuming a 40 hour week at A$20, it's legally impossible to earn half of that as the minimum wage here is A$14.40. If we're comparing to other nations then we also need to compare the cost of living which is quite high here in Australia.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
How on earth did we fail?
You're app really isn't that good. Piracy really isn't as big as you'd like to think it is.
If you re-read my post I think you will find that you missed a lot in your first reading. I implied that the only reason for any success at all in the company was the piracy. Without the piracy, we had *no* customers. In our case piracy == good. Not that management could understand this...
The nature of the app made it easy for us to determine the level of piracy. If you have 10K users and 1K customers, 9K aren't paying. It's not difficult math. Since the users generally had to use facilities on our servers we could easily tell what was going on.
Just to make things clear, my last statement was sarcastic. Perhaps it isn't as obvious to others as it is to me, but our customers *didn't have any money*. This is why we failed. Not piracy. Piracy was helping. Some of those pirates had money and were willing to buy the app eventually. Moronic sales people trying to sell software to fly-by-night service companies with no money was a less successful tactic.
There are lots of things that I can afford but choose not to buy. It doesn't mean that no effort went into producing them, it means that their value to me is lower than their cost.
I agree. And then you even forget the opportunity costs. Even if the value of the "thing" you're considering buying is larger than its cost, you can only spend the money once. Thus, you buy the "thing" that has the highest value for the price you pay.
Someone should mod you up for this ... this company's numbers are complete FUD. 60% of a small piece of a small piece of a small piece of a huge pie != 60% of a huge pie.
"And if that's not enough of a rationalization of music piracy, we're eager to suggest others. Just watch."
Hilarious! The really funny thing is that Slashdotters didn't even stop to think twice about offering up their bogus rationalizations for ripping off the music industry. I love it!
Dear Idiots: Please find a clue-stick and proceed to hit yourselves in the head is hard as you can with it. If someone if offering music to you, but it comes at a price, pay for it, or don't. Don't be a douche and deny them their fair wage just because you think you are justified. Don't you know that you are too stupid to justify yourselves?
As such, it's in Pinch Media's interests to make piracy seem more common, because app devs will make ad supported apps
There are a host of other concerns around ad supported apps that would far outweigh this factor for a developer (for instance, the aesthetics of embedding ads in your application). Then there's also this:
"Pirated applications are used less frequently, less intensely, and for a shorter overall length of time than purchased applications."
So piracy DOES also affect apps with ads, they simply will not be used as much and therefore generate less revenue.
But really, the whole argument is flawed because the article summary has a sensationalist miscasting of what the 60% number means. I have been to a talk given by the 360 guy talking about pretty much all the same figures illustrated, and in no way did he indicate piracy was common, even though he was using the same numbers - you are confusing an Apple Haters attempt to spread FUD around iPhone piracy (I presume to try and drive off development on the platform) with marketing efforts on the behalf of Pinch Media. You are also attributing to Pinch statements made by Gamasutra.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Whenever a developer claims to be "losing money" to piracy, one has to wonder... are the developers losing this money trying to combat piracy directly (lawsuits and DRM tactics), or is it simply a case of self-flattery, where the developer is grossly over-estimating the value of their software, thinking "If my software isn't great, then why would anyone pirate it?"
There may be some cases where a pirated copy is a "lost sale". This includes where you (or your vendor) won't actually sell it potential customers or where you are trying to sell it at too higher price. The latter including price differentiation based on a customer's physical location (or that of their credit card issuer).
To the typical customer geographical price differentiation, especially of something which has no physical substance, equates to "they tried to rip me off". Thus "piracy" is a perfectly justified, even a morally required action. So best make sure that your 0.99 USD equates to 0.67 EUR, 0.60 GBP, 1.06 CAD, 1.08 AUD, 88.08 JPY, 46.08 INR, 3.76 ARS, 7.51 ZAR or whatever the applicable exchange rate at the time is. Which you don't even have to worry about, since the banks will take care of any necessary conversions.
I once worked for a small company with a semi-popular application. Sales were almost all of the form of pay pal purchases off the website.
Remember that there are plenty of people who will have nothing to do with Pay Pal...
It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to pay one developer. But piracy was a huge problem. It was quite obvious that more than 90% of the copies running were pirated.
So what? Especially considering that the sales were bringing in a useful amount of money, which puts it in the minority to start with. All these people were doing was getting hold of your game without paying a small sum of money. It's not as if they were kidnapping people at gunpoint and requesting huge sums of money for their safe return.
The company changed directions and started bundling the application for free with online services. The service provider would pay for the application and the customers would get the software for use only with the service. But the company was worried about piracy, so they asked me to write DRM that tied the application to the service. They would continue to sell an untied version off the website, but with "call home" DRM (it's an internet app, so it's not quite as draconian as it sounds). I very reluctantly agreed (i.e., I had to decide whether it was worth quitting over -- if I had to do it again, I'd quit).
The end result was that all piracy stopped. In fact, all usage stopped. Instead of selling 2 or 3 copies a day off the website, not one copy of the DRM version was ever sold. And due to very poor choices of service provider partners, the company received no revenue at all. Within a year the company had folded.
This is known as "cutting one's nose off to spite one's face".
The thing is, the new version was head and shoulders better than then non-DRMed version. And the DRM was truly unobtrusive (think DRM in WoW). Paying customers wouldn't even know it existed.
How was it "better"? At best DRM is neutral at worst it causes issues such as making an application less reliable, more resource intensive or other ways which detract from whatever the primary purpose of the app is intended to be.
Just to make things clear, my last statement was sarcastic. Perhaps it isn't as obvious to others as it is to me, but our customers *didn't have any money*.
Or rather that you don't have any customers. Since your business model appeared to have changed to one where you expected third parties to sell your product then pass the money onto you. But those third parties have nothing to lose by not selling your product.
This is why we failed. Not piracy. Piracy was helping. Some of those pirates had money and were willing to buy the app eventually.
If anything piracy was part of your, as then, sucessful business model. Though maybe an unintended and univited part of it.
Moronic sales people trying to sell software to fly-by-night service companies with no money was a less successful tactic.
Also at this point you stopped what you had been doing and tried to do something different. The true morons here are the management not doing something, including returning to the previous way of doing things when it became apparent that money was no longer coming in...
The gamasutra link in the /. article stated:
Greg Yardley confirms that getting ripped off by pirates is the rule rather than the exception.
It didn't say that piracy was the rule, rather than the exception. It said having some people rip off your software was the rule rather than the exception.
I would say that the /. headline kicked it up a notch. Either someone didn't read the article, or they decided to bend the truth with a sensationalist headline, to attract more readers.
Perhap also they were mislead by the media hype into thinking - as some readers here genuinely do - that the Iphone is what the majority of users have. Given the reality is that the Iphone has perhaps 1-2% market share, then when their sales are accordingly 50+ times lower than expected, with their products being far outsold by non-Iphone products, you can see them grasping at "piracy" for an explanation.
Yeah, $0.99 is a bargain for something that displays an image, and even animates it.
Get real - any other platform, people release that kind of thing, and far more than that, for free. My phone runs plenty of free Java applications, but you don't get that choice on the Iphone. Not that that justifies piracy - it justifies not buying a damn Iphone in the first place.
Sure, for any other platform this is how it works, but for the Iphone, surely this is the problem? I could write it myself, but then I have the worry of what if Apple don't approve my "app"? What about the fee I have to pay them?
Your argument works for open platforms, but it demonstrates why Apple's policy is such a problem.
(As an aside, I love how whilst on any other Slashdot story about piracy, the vast majority of comments are in favour of filesharing, and against the RIAA etc. But with Apple stories, it's always the other way around - suddenly piracy is an evil evil thing, how dare we steal from those poor Iphone developers!)
He could download a cheaper app from a competing site. Oh wait, he can't, because he's an Iphone user. Unless he hacks his phone. Apple - It Just Works!
Well, at least 99% of phone users don't have this problem, as they don't use an Iphone. They just download whatever apps they like, from whatever site they like, often free of charge.
I take you don't know what the 'Parent' button means.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1452282&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=30180522
The gist of it is that he is reproducing the parent's text who has the spelling error in it. He is showing he knows its wrong and that it is the other guy's mistake not his. He's also calling him a motherfucker at the same time.
ALSO: It's now ME who is being the smartass.
Still? In the age of 7Zip and Windows handling archives from the shell?
We don't pirate applications
Wait, what? Since when? Games are applications too, and every time some story comes out about drm and games, there are always the obligatory posts which say "fuck that, I'm pirating", "you'd pirate anyway", "I'm just trying an extended demo", etc etc.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Or that 40% of applications are garbage and pirates aren't even willing to take them for free?
You mean that the pirates will actually buy apps, test them, and if they don't like them will just throw them away and not put them on P2P?
So the pirates have an app approval process too.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
-- are markedly different than the slutty little panty flashers and boys in girls pants that get pimped by the recording studios, but to whom no one wants to listen, and thus it can't possibly be that the product sucks... nope -- PIRACY is responsible for the decline in revenue.
So you advocate piracy of those panty flashers, because not only do they not deserve money, but also because nobody listens to them anyway. Yeah, that makes sense.
Or are you actually claiming that at any given time Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, B.B. King and Jimmie Page together will have as many songs on P2P as e.g. Britney Spears? And that none of the people downloading the BS songs would have bought them if there was no way to get them for free? And that the same goes for the songs for the real musicians?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I take it you don't know what 'sic' means. The gist of it is that he is reproducing someone else's text who [sic] has the spelling error in it.
Yes, I do. Please reread the comment I replied to, and note the misuse of who's, which prompted me to quote the comment and use sic to indicate the error (it doesn't have to be a spelling mistake, it just means 'this is exactly as it was written motherfuckers'). Though I must thank you for giving me another opportunity to use sic.
I love how the righteous link to wikipedia earned you several insightful mod points.
The problem is that "micro-transactions" have crept into every aspect of life.
If take the time to add up all your "buck here, buck there" transactions, you may be surprised just how much you spend.
Yeah, yeah. Before there were "micro-payments", people explained away their piracy with the fact that actually buying something was so expensive just to find out that it was too much - if only there was some sort of "micro-transaction" that would allow you to buy the stuff much cheaper. It's a bunch of dishonesty, ultimately, and it's obvious that lots of cheap people aren't convinced that this hipocracy is so terrible..
Fucking stop fooling yourself guys, you pirate because you think free isn't cheap enough, instead you should get money for bothering with other people's work.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
So any developer that cares about the pirating can make the job a lot harder if they really want by preventing functionality on pirated copies.
Of course if they did, the pirates would still crack it, and actually use their action as an excuse for doing so.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Of course if they did, the pirates would still crack it, and actually use their action as an excuse for doing so.
That's possible, but it would only happen for the most popular titles since it's not something you can automate, and requires real skill far beyond most people "cracking" iPhone apps today. Your 99c app "Timmy Shoots Grapes"? Probably not going to be cracked, which is good because there is not much revenue there to protect...
But most developers realize that happy users are a form of free publicity even if they are pirates, and so will continue to simply track and do nothing else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is that you need 1.6 acts per week to get that and that it takes more then 20 hours of practice to be performance ready. You're also not counting equipment which is per person A$1500 for a cheap performance grade guitar and A$1000 for a cheap performance grade amplifier.
And guitarists can get by relatively cheap. Bassists have instruments that are roughly as expensive, though their amps cost more, and strings considerably more so ($10-15 for 6 guitar strings, $30-40 for 4 bass strings) which are usually replaced before every performance. Drummers get it even worse, they might manage to get by with $3000 worth of drums.
The point I was trying to make is that the people who play local gigs and teach music locally do it because they love to do it (much like OSS dev's) but the music industry only attracts those who want money, not the love of music. OK a bit OTT but tell me it's not true.
Actually, many 'recording artists' love making music, and a record label is usually the only way they can manage to do music full time. I'm willing to bet you that >95% of major recording artists started for the love of what they were doing and just wanted to get their music heard. Once they got their first big check, though, they were addicted to big money.
If they just wanted money, they probably would have looked into something less demanding than music. Just like your average corporate programmer likes writing code, they wanted a way to make a living doing it. It's not that they don't like what they do, only that working for a business is the easiest (and most secure) way to earn a living.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Being paid a reasonable wage for a reasonable amount of work is one thing, being paid huge amounts of money for work you haven't even done recently is quite another.
Software companies make millions off the hard work of their programmers, and they don't get an ongoing percentage of sales. If that programmer leaves, they stop getting anything at all but the company continues to make millions from the work they did.
Congratulations, that's the difference between being an entrepenour/business owner/actor/recording artist and a salaried or hourly laborer. The first group takes the lions share of the risk of failure in exchange for recurring profits from sales. The second group takes minimal risk with a guarantee of money paid for services rendered, regardless of future results.
You don't get celebrity programmers for the same reason you don't get celebrity brick layers. Instead you get celebrity software designers (Will Wright, Tim Shaffer) or architects (Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry). While a skilled laborer can ruin a project if they don't perform well, only the designer can make a project succeed. It doesn't matter haw straight the brickwork is or how fast the GUI operates: if the building/program is designed like shit, nobody cares.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Perhaps it is time for you to stop making excuses for piracy. We all know that not every pirated copy is a lost sale. But we can be pretty certain that it does cause some lost sales. That is why most game makers are moving to consoles off of PCs since consoles have a more closed nature to them that prevents piracy.
Really, I have to wonder where you get this sense of entitlement. That you can take what others have worked so hard over. Particularly over these games that cost between $1 and $5. How can you call that cost unreasonable?
If you are going to pirate, fine, do it. I honestly don't care. But don't try to justify piracy as something that is morally right. It isn't, it is wrong. And companies should absolutely be concerned about. I'm sure if this was a business you owned and people were taking without paying you, you would be more sympathetic.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
You failed because your company was stupid enough to think something would sell without advertising. It had nothing to do with DRM or piracy.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
So only 60% pirated, eh?
Congratulations on that! You beat everything else!
Stil sucks to be so crappy that one wouldn't even pirate the OS, though, right? Ah, well, I promise to listen to more stories of your world. It's interesting, really, I mean that, good with some change to the real world :)
XOXO
So there are no songwriters, instrumentalists, or producers involved in any of Britney Spears's records? They just somehow appear from the ether through the evil powers of the record companies?
For Britney Spears' albums, that would be my assertion, yes. :)
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
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