Our Pirate Game is Getting Owned By App Store Pirates

A nice sensible response, with some well-reasoned observations.<p>The thing about piracy I've always found weird is how hysterical some people get about it for their medium and not others. For example, I am good friends with several software developers who get furious about people pirating their products, but have no qualms about having gigs of copied music personally.

85% piracy rates. Ouch. It hurts me to even read that, although part of me has to point out that when you're developing for an audience which considers $2 expensive and $5 highway robbery, going in with the expectation that people will happily pay you money is a little optimistic.<p>On the plus side, you can't possibly have a worse piracy problem with your application than China does with everything, and you'll probably eventually do what Chinese software companies do: put the real meat on the server, let everyone have your client for free, and let the users who prefer to Own Their Games Instead Of Renting Them cry to themselves in the corner.

Eh, this game is being pirated more than the average app.<p>From what I heard at Greg Yardley (PinchMedia)'s talk at 360idev yesterday, the average piracy rate is 34%. My personal experience with Boxcar lines up with those numbers, along with a 0.056% conversion rate from pirated to paid. The "average" there, again according to PinchMedia, is 0.043% or 1 in 233.<p>They're taking the right approach in that, well, the truth is if someone is going to pirate something then even if you try and dissuade them they'll just move on to the next one. In my particular case, I send a push notification letting them know we've detected that they are using a pirated copy, and then disable their account. If they purchase the legitimate version, their account will automatically be re-enabled.<p>If I didn't have a backend server with monthly hosting costs, I wouldn't care that the application was being pirated. They use it, then move on. Based on the conversion rates I've seen myself and have heard of from others, it's just not worth the effort to try and get someone to purchase it.<p>Those conversion rates also invalidate the entire "I'm just trying it before buying it" argument, which is complete bullshit.<p>Pirates discuss it on Twitter: <a href="http://twitpic.com/jor06" rel="nofollow">http://twitpic.com/jor06</a><p>And I also get emails about it -- angry ones: <a href="http://jdg.net/post/160979167/retard" rel="nofollow">http://jdg.net/post/160979167/retard</a><p><a href="http://jdg.net/post/151845213/some-people-just-amaze-me-unfortunately-this-is" rel="nofollow">http://jdg.net/post/151845213/some-people-just-amaze-me-unfo...</a><p><a href="http://jdg.net/post/142912680/yep-dont-buy-this-piece-of-crap-or-how-about" rel="nofollow">http://jdg.net/post/142912680/yep-dont-buy-this-piece-of-cra...</a>

It's interesting that they claim that piracy was largely responsible for an increase in sales... I wonder if this is more because people are using piracy to sample the games before they buy or because the pirating users are increasing the buzz behind the game?

<i>Why we are not that concerned that our app has been pirated:</i><p>I think it takes a small dev studio or independent developer to have enough feel for these reasons why piracy isn't so bad.<p>I feel the same way about my book - I like seeing people pirate it, even if the publisher doesn't! It doesn't seem to hurt sales and raises awareness, as these guys have found.<p>That said, ripping off a PDF to boost print book sales is a different kettle of fish than ripping off a game that's identical to the legit version.. I wonder how this will fare long term.

You have to compete with piracy by offering premium levels of service one where it requires your users to pay to connect to your server to say play against others across the world and other things that require a server connection.<p>Sure they might try to break into your server, but less will do that and that is more illegal and punishable by law at least in the states.<p>Piracy made hollywood and music biz innovate we should be no different.

How are people cracking and using cracked applications on the iPhone? Am I just living in the dark by using the App Store and clicking "Install"?

"Piracy rate" doesn't seem like a useful metric; it's too dependent on your sales. I'd rather see sales numbers and piracy numbers.<p>If you sell 10 and have 10 pirates, that's a 50% piracy rate. If you sell 1000 and have 10 pirates (same number of pirates) that's only 1% piracy rate. The ratio is less useful and more misleading than the raw numbers.

Since the cost of the app is so low, along with the barrier of entry to buy it, this data suggests to me these people must be discovering it through the piracy community (peer recommendation basically) If they've already learned how to pirate iPhone apps it's probably just easier for them to use a process they're familiar with. I'm guessing the ability to do batch installs of many apps at once is a big selling point of the iPhone piracy community so maybe Apple can learn something from that.

The sad thing is that it is incredibly easy to catch pirates if only Apple allowed us to.