The huge success of an AppStore failure

Yes i get sickened by how much pirates use games today. They totally ruin the industry and the effort that developers have taken to make these game.

 

That's not to say that they'd have made 16,000 sales had it not been available for free though. To be honest, 1163 sales in comparison to 16,000 players sounds not unlike the kind of popularity ratio a paid app has when using a free period promotion.

 

Wow, just wow. I didn't realise piracy was as rife as that on iPhones, iPods etc. Really feel for the developers.
What is jailbreaking by the way?

 

Well, I think it's safe to say that you wouldn't have 16,000 legitimate downloads if it weren't for people pirating your app. In my opinion, people who are going to pirate an application were never going to buy it in the first place. I doubt they saw the application in iTunes and said, "Oh, I don't want to spend $.99 on this. I wonder if it's on a certain website that lets you pirate applications which is censored on Toucharcade!" My guess is that the majority of people who download cracked applications are those who either don't have a way to pay on iTunes (i.e. no credit card) or don't have any money to spend on apps. Either way, I believe that the majority of pirates wouldn't purchase an app if pirating it wasn't an option.

So I wonder how much money developers really lose from pirating. It's definitely a different story with other platforms where the games are $50, but $.99 is another story imo.

Regardless, it's unfortunate, but I doubt it'll stop.

 

Ignoring the matter of whether pirated copies equal lost sales, something I don't feel like getting into, your blog's key point is barking up the wrong tree and is possibly exaggerating the key point while you're at it because you're ignoring something critical about Game Center:

The Game Center ID is NOT necessarily linked in any way to the Apple ID used to buy the title. In my household, I'll purchase an app. As it happens in my case, my GC email used to log in IS the same as the one used to purchase the app, but my daughter and son will often all wind up playing it on other devices all with different GC accounts. By your faulty logic, seeing us buying your product and all playing it would equal two cases of piracy.

Apple simply didn't build any form of product verification into Game Center because I'm not sure how their existing DRM infrastructure could support it. You can have 5 computers and a functionally unlimited number of devices using an app from a single legit purchase. You can have any number of GC accounts if you want. So, how exactly do you propose Apple uses GC to combat piracy?

Your beef is with the jailbreak developers who make the easy piracy possible, not Apple for making Game Center a relatively painless and quick added value to gaming on iOS.

 

Of course, surely it could also be the case that some of those numbers are accounted for by players having more than one gamecentre account?

I might add piracy is dreadful and people should be paid for the effort they put in. Too many people think it is a right to have free software without realising how much work goes into these things!

 

+1 Well put.

 

I don't want to get into a long and tedious piracy argument, but I do want to say this:

1) A pirated product is not necessarily a lost sale. Yes, $0.99 is incredibly cheap. But none of us can make blanket judgements about an entire group of people that is incredibly wide and varied. People are from many different backgrounds and have different needs.
2) Just because someone pirates a game does not mean it is a permanently lost opportunity cost. That person could have told a friend about it, and then that friend could have purchased the game. Piracy can be an effective method of advertisement.
3) What it all comes down to is whether or not the product is worth buying (if they have money), or whether the person has money that is disposable. Based on what i've seen on the appstore, Fingerkicks just doesn't really intrigue me. At all. The description claims that it is addictive at the top, but then the rest of it just seems pretty plain and ordinary. Both the icon and the screenshots do not give me any real information about why this app is more interesting, fun, or special than the 100,000s of other apps on the appstore.
4) You don't have a lite version. Combine this with 3, and you have a good reason for people to pirate-- at least to try before they buy.

I've seen many posts by devs about piracy on the appstore, and of course I sympathize with the hard work that goes into it. But sometimes there are issues on the marketing or game end that explain a lot of it.

 

That just sucks... I actually used  on April, I didn't understand there was so many indie devs that work their butts off, then I finally found iTunes gift cards from local shop, and thank god, I stopped jailbreaking. And I gotta agree with SkyMuffin, if all games had Lite versions, more people would try before using installers. I think some people use it as a demo. For me it was cause dad doesn't trust online purchases... That's why I was glad I found iTunes GC's from local shop.

 

Just my 5 cents.

Don't forget that AppStore is not available in all countries where Apple push their products. For example, I live in Ukraine and I can legally buy iPod Touch in almost every shop. But I can't buy from the AppStore. So the only way for me to get apps for my device is to jailbreak it, even if I am willing to pay and there are many games that I'd gladly buy.

There's also such things as the regional promotion. Someone might post about your game on a website that is popular in some country. And most downloads might be done from that website. Who knows, how much copies were downloaded by the people who can't buy it because Apple doesn't allow them to do that?

ps. My device isn't jailbroken, but I have to find ways to get iTunes gift cards if I want to buy something for my iPod. I have some friends in the US who help me with that sometimes, but for many people who doesn't have such a friends there it's impossible to buy.

 

That's an interesting point of view... And sorry that you don't have an App Store!

 

I find that there is no need to pirate games, because there are so many great free games on the app store. Unfortunately Apple makes it incredibly difficult to find any good free games on the app store, and instead they decide to showcase cruddy apps with ads everywhere and a hundred 1-star reviews.

As soon as I joined Touch Arcade however, I found out about a bunch of free games I haven't even heard about before. Not only that, but the must-have freebies section helped me find a bunch of amazing games that have gone on sale and become free (the "older must have free games" thread is a godsend). Looking on the app store, I don't see these great games anywhere. Instead, all I find are cruddy freemium apps and apps that can barely be considered games. If only Apple could tweak the app store to showcase better apps more, the average iPhone owner could find this great stuff and decide that there is no need to pirate apps.

I currently have over 70 games in my iTunes that I downloaded for free in some way or the other (through a sale, promo code, lite version, but NOT pirating) and they are all quality games that the average iPhone owner likely doesn't know about (I wonder if my sister has ever heard of Bug Heroes?) I barely have any more room on my iTouch because it is filled with free apps (not to mention music and the occasional podcast) so this is proof that if someone doesn't have money to spend on apps for whatever reason they don't need to pirate stuff to get enjoyment out of their iPhone.