Slashdot Mirror
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."'"
Does pirating an iphone app require a jailbroken phone?
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?
Doesn't that essentially indicate the apps are overpriced to begin with? (not that this is a legitimate excuse for pirating them).
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.
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.
Can't we get someone who's first language is English to proof-read these things?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/definitively
http://www.answers.com/definitely
http://www.lemondrop.com/2009/06/16/the-most-misspelled-word-definitely/
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 ?
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?
I want to see people who develop for the iphone go out of business, and hopefully take Apple with them
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
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?
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.
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.
Perhaps it's time to RTFS. The guy's talking about things like servers for multiplayer games being exploited by non-paying customers.
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!
http://www.coolforsale.com/ Christmas is around the corner: And old customers can also enjoy the gifts sent by my company in a can also request to our company. Gifts lot,Buy more get the moreOnly this site have this treatmentOur goal is "Best quality, Best reputation , Best services". Your satisfaction is our main pursue. You can find the best products from us, meeting your different needs. Ladies and Gentlemen weicome to my coolforsale.com.Here,there are the most fashion products . Pass by but don't miss it.Select your favorite clothing! Welcome to come next time ! Thank you! http://www.coolforsale.com/productlist.asp?id=s76 (Tracksuit w) ugg boot,POLO hoody,Jacket, Air jordan(1-24)shoes $33 Nike shox(R4,NZ,OZ,TL1,TL2,TL3) $35 Handbags(Coach lv fendi d&g) $35 Tshirts (Polo ,ed hardy,lacoste) $16 free shipping competitive price any size available accept the paypal Thanks
I find it interesting, if not enlightening that piracy statistics increase in circumstances where markets are repressed through aggressive control structures.
Ubiquitous software that is easily obtained anywhere is less likely to be pirated than "exclusive" software items, as a function of the reduced need to obtain it through just 2 channels [the 'legit' "exclusive" channel, and the pirate chanel], since many other distribution channels exist to meet the market's consumption demand.
in the case of apple's App Store; the gateway to ownership/installation of software on the iPhone is tightly restricted, and there is no other legitimate distribution channel besides the one Apple sanctions. This leaves ONLY the pirate channel to satisfy the market demand of disenfranchised users, or of users that have a reason to not use the gateway Apple provides.
Thus, at best, Piracy would statistically be 50% if you assume even odds in the distribution.
The problem is not one of piracy, but of lack of legitimate distribution channels, which make piracy the only other alternative.
To me, this implies that "Stopping piracy" is not the correct course of action; Rather, the iPhone should be permitted additional channels of software distribution than just Apple's. Each new choice would geometrically reduce the % of users which utilize the pirate distribution channel for iPhone software, up until you reach the REAL baseline piracy rate. (Apple will never agree to this, because the same would hold true for their own channel, which would result in lost revinue potential. Instead they whine about not being the ONLY game in town, because of all those dirty pirates.)
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.
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
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.
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.
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
...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
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.
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!
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'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...
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}}
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.
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'
The parent raises the perfectly innocent point, does it require jailbreaking? Mods are on crack again.
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.
All you faggots telling people the reason no one buys your app is because it sucks, you all deserve to die from anal haemorrhaging. The reason no one buys my app is that the company is run by a filthy, worthless, God-damned bastard sand nigger who's just as much of a lying corporate cheat who belongs in jail.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
i read this as a request for info, but obviously the modders see it as an offensive declarative:-(
ltfu...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!)
Still? In the age of 7Zip and Windows handling archives from the shell?
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
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