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."'"

Comments

Stealing is Stealing

[llZENll]

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.

Re:Losing to Piracy, or, Over-Estimating App Value

[BitZtream]

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.

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?