Recently, iPhone developer Smells Like Donkey posted a report that their game Tap-Fu had suffered a nearly 85 percent piracy rate during its first week of availability. Proving that the problem with iPhone piracy is not isolated, Fishlabs recently revealed that their game Rally Master Pro 3D had a 95 percent piracy rate on its first day. CEO Michael Schade noted "this makes it very hard to believe in the future of the App Store, sometimes."
Mobile Entertainment spoke with Schade, who detailed how he got his piracy statistics. "We track UDID's [unique device identifiers] anonymously per day, deduct the reported sales and we have the number of pirated downloads," he says. "In this case, many thousands on day one."
When asked about a DLC supported business model, Schade responded, "The model of free-to-play and monetize over time with extra features or extra content that is available online only is a dodgy game. I can already hear the same complaints about online certification using in-app purchases to download content as we saw with Galaxy On Fire 2 in Java. Maybe it will work better on iPhone since online connectivity is better on iPhone than Java, though."
"There are a lot of possibilities to encrypt the applications stronger," he continued. "Apple told us in-app purchase is one key against piracy, but I doubt that. We will see in the future how well in-app purchases fight piracy."
3 Comments
October 28, 2009
Piracy in the App Store is real but not overly huge. When we released Castle Conflict, we got pirated approximately 6000 times in the first week, while we got around 100 sales. It was a huge deal at the time, but the piracy numbers changed drastically. Initially, a lot of pirates download the app but that pretty much dropped off after a week. That didn't stop our app from getting traction in the app store and eventually reaching the point of 800 sales a day during its peak. Over the lifetime, the number of people who have pirated the app versus those who have purchased it has decreased hugely.
Furthermore, there are now tools you can put in your app to prevent people from pirating your app. Developers should check out http://drobnik.com/touch/anticrack. I haven't used it yet myself but another developer I know has been using it to detect and prevent piracy with success.
October 28, 2009
Very interesting. Thanks for the comment Stephen.
March 15, 2010
I think the thing I like most about reading these iPhone piracy articles is the lengths people will go to rationalize piracy. The J2ME version of Rally Master Pro was Pocket Gamer's game of the year for 2008. Don't steal from developers because you're too lazy to type the name of a game in to Google.
iedge cartucho