A nice sensible response, with some well-reasoned observations.
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.
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.
It seems to me that people are associating the platform with the price its software should cost, rather than on the quality, playability or usability of said software.
Sure, some of the App Store games you could easily picture winding up on one of those "5,000 Games!" CDs if they were developed on the PC. Those Apps probably should be free or 99 cents at the most. Some of the games and apps could easily be considered full featured desktop products that might sell for $10-$20 on a PC/Mac. It's my assumption that one of the reasons these are NOT desktop apps already is because it's notoriously hard to market and publish desktop software and because the iPhone/iPod Touch has the "IT" factor right now. But just because it's an iPhone app and not a Mac app, why should it cost any less?
Unless of course you consider the extra marketing and publishing costs of putting out games for a PC or Mac into the cost of the product. But does that really make a $20 app a $1 app if you remove those costs?
I've read a few articles/posts about piracy rates, and it seems that a piracy rate of 90% is "normal", at least for PC titles. So to me it seems like piracy on the iPhone is lower than it could have been, and a lot lower if it drops to 50%. Still a problem, of course, but if Apple keep making it more complicated to jailbreak the hardware it might actually be moving towards 0%.
Eh, this game is being pirated more than the average app.
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.
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.
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.
Those conversion rates also invalidate the entire "I'm just trying it before buying it" argument, which is complete bullshit.
Interesting data...to your point about our piracy rates being high at 85% - I agree but think it is only a symptom of our App being new and expect it to trend toward 50% or less in a few months.
Also important to note is that calculated the piracy rate as the difference between iTunes sales and Pinch media uniques. I have found that Pinch Media's data is less conclusive than it used to be so I wasn't using their metrics for either cracked or jailbroken phones.
As for the pirates try before they buy excuse, I agree that this is probably not the case. I think it is a churn game (similar to music) for most pirates - they try hundreds of apps for very little time and stick with only the very few that they like.
As for your piracy block - I tried this once and decided better to let them have a lite version of the app over blocking them entirely. Not sure the point of angering the most vocal, early adopters on the web. Check out a post I wrote dealing with this: http://www.icombatgame.com/2009/05/22/on-the-web-every-users...
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?
According to him, the pirate users only sampled a little bit of the game before moving on. As the OP states, pirates are more interested in the novelty of it.
That's an interesting point - pirates mostly don't actually use their stuff!
Essentially pirating is a way to try the app out, then I guess the percentage of pirates who buy it is pretty high. So why not make trying apps more convenient?
Why we are not that concerned that our app has been pirated:
I think it takes a small dev studio or independent developer to have enough feel for these reasons why piracy isn't so bad.
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.
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.
Off topic: What are the final costs of a book and what is the share? (i.e. printing, authors cut, publisher’s cut)?
Buying books really hurts my back-pocket (the last book cost me $140+ dollars – and it is a lot more expensive if you do the currency conversation). What is sad is that when I move to another country I will not be able to move all my books. If there is a good e-book reader and books are well-priced (e.g. $30-40 directly to the author) it would feel a lot less painful.
I don't know the costs because I'm not a publisher but.. I think my book has an RRP of $40. Most places sell it for less than that. Amazon, for example, sell it for $26.
According to my royalty documents, my publisher gets about $18 per copy and I get between 10% and 20% of that depending on how many copies I sell. The 20% rate only kicks in after about 25,000 copies or so and few programming books do that well (my first edition sold just under 10,000), so effectively I get around $1.80-$2.50 a copy.
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.
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.
Piracy made hollywood and music biz innovate we should be no different.
iPhones can run unsigned apps after only a few minor changes, even if they're not jailbroken. The most games and popular apps are widely available through the typical piracy channels.
I don't get it either. My guess is that people install a cracked version through Cydia to use on a jailbroken iPhone. I'd love to have this confirmed though.
not to encourage, but You simply jailbreak the iphone, once you have Cydia - then find read up on installous (which is a pirate version of the appstore) works up to 3.0 and had 90% of the most popular apps.
"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.
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.
Agreed - especially given the stated belief that the pirates are in it for novelty, many will presumably delete the game after cycling through it. As such, piracy rates go down over time (a trend noted by the OP), even if sales figures (which are more important) don't change much at all.
Of course, doesn't take away from how great it is for them to share this information at all.
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 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.