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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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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?
The same could be said about music, but that doesn't go over so well :)
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.
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.
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
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
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);
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.
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...
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
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
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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//
There's no reason at all not to believe these numbers, as Pinch Media gains nothing by the numbers being higher or lower
Not so. Pinch media make money from apps which sell advertising space. Apps which are ad funded don't care about (or even benefit from) piracy.
As such, it's in Pinch Media's interests to make piracy seem more common, because app devs will make ad supported apps, which means Pinch get more business.
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.
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}}
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
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.