

Our Pirate Game is Getting Owned By App Store Pirates - theappfarm
http://silverskullgame.blogspot.com/2009/09/our-pirate-game-is-getting-owned-by-app.html

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timcederman
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.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the rationale people are using here is that it's the record companies
they're pirating from not the artists.

Artists like Janis Ian ( <http://www.janisian.com/article-
internet_debacle.html> (be sure to read the follow up)) have made that point
quite eloquently.

Still, the basic position is one of hypocrisy, no contest there.

~~~
trapper
And EA and the other big game companies aren't just like them?

The people that I know that pirate the most music do so off independents more
than mainstream.

~~~
jacquesm
> The people that I know that pirate the most music do so off independents
> more than mainstream.

That's really bad.

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patio11
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.

~~~
m_eiman
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%.

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jdg
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.

Pirates discuss it on Twitter: <http://twitpic.com/jor06>

And I also get emails about it -- angry ones:
<http://jdg.net/post/160979167/retard>

[http://jdg.net/post/151845213/some-people-just-amaze-me-
unfo...](http://jdg.net/post/151845213/some-people-just-amaze-me-
unfortunately-this-is)

[http://jdg.net/post/142912680/yep-dont-buy-this-piece-of-
cra...](http://jdg.net/post/142912680/yep-dont-buy-this-piece-of-crap-or-how-
about)

~~~
theappfarm
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...](http://www.icombatgame.com/2009/05/22/on-the-web-every-users-
opinion-counts-even-the-pirates/)

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jcl
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?

~~~
Scriptor
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.

~~~
borism
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?

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petercooper
_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.

~~~
catzaa
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.

~~~
petercooper
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.

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paul9290
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.

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bestes
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"?

~~~
kingsley_20
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.

~~~
jawngee
You can't install cracked stuff through Cydia, you have to use something like
installous via hackulo.us.

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xsmasher
"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.

~~~
JacobAldridge
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.

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jsz0
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.

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

~~~
enneff
The pirates would then take the necessary steps to avoid being caught.

