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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."'"
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.