Who pirates iPad and iPhone games? Approximately nobody. But the problem describe in the article is acute for game publishers regardless of platform.
The public has brought this upon themselves, sure, but more by being cheapskates. And I think Apple has contributed to this as well; their app store design isn't helping.
On the iOS family you can install Cydia which lets you install 3rd party non-apple-sanctioned apps. This in turn let's you download things like Installous which lets you download every single popular App for free, pirated.
There is a HUGE amount of people who pirate iOS apps.
The approach you describe requires a jailbroken phone, plus going through a lot of shenanigans. Even most of the nerds I know haven't bothered to jailbreak their iPhones. I'm very skeptical that a significant number of civilians do it. Certainly not a significant number of civilians who would otherwise pay for games.
I've talked a lot with friends who started an iPhone games company two years back. They have mentioned a ton of issues in the marketplace, but worrying about piracy has never come up. Ever.
I've seen no data on "lots of people". Even if it happens, I've seen no evidence that it's a significant concern of people writing iPhone games. And if it were a significant concern, I'd still be skeptical that there's a real financial impact, as opposed to the erhmagerd school of "they are stealing my precious things" freak-out. And if there were a measurable financial impact, which I don't think there is, then I'd expect it to be an order of magnitude smaller than the concerns raised in the article.
This is silly. You're suggesting that at one point, there were high quality games that people pirated in the first place. I was in the mobile games industry for a while. There weren't and saying that a "HUGE" amount of people pirated those games is total bs.
[citation needed]
I have hard time believing HUGE amount of people jailbreak and pirate, given that most people wouldn't know their way around jailbreak and with all those iOS upgrades you'd need to re-jailbreak it at regular intervals.
In Asia, you can walk into most malls, go to the Electronics section, and almost every other vendor will have a dirt cheap (in US standards) offer to jailbreak your phone for you. From there, a basic upsell (or free with jailbreak) is to install any iOS app they have in their library for free.
Just because it doesn't happen here in the US, doesn't mean it's the same everywhere.
The fact that people in Asia (who did not buy games 20 years ago and do not buy games now) pirate them is completely irrelevant for the actions of the US market. Unless the argument is "Americans don't buy games anymore because Asians pirate them".
I was just responding to "I have hard time believing HUGE amount of people jailbreak and pirate". Someone else is contending that if a significant number of people pirate a game, it can affect their server costs/performance.
In any case at least 80% aren't pirating (since iOS 7 had 80% user share before the jailbreak came out). 80% of the iOS market should be enough to survive on.
Piracy is actually fairly common. One of the dangers with an iOS game is that you have to make sure that your per-copy expenses are low. For example, if the game requires server capacity, you must make sure that the lifetime cost of the server per user is much lower than the purchase price, because pirates will cost you money without giving you any. There's at least one well-known failure due to this problem, and I'm sure it influences lots of other games without being obvious.
However, it's still really different from piracy on the PC, because the piracy is still limited. With the exception of per-user costs like above, it doesn't matter how many people pirate your game. What matters is only how many people pirate it instead of buying it, and the high barrier to piracy on iOS means that most of your potential buyers won't pirate.
Sorry, that was just my laziness leaking through, as I thought it would be hard to actually dig up. But it turned out to be easy! Search for "Battle Dungeon".
Who pirates iPad and iPhone games? Approximately nobody.
How many AAA titles with nine-figure budgets and $50-100 up-front price tags are there on the iPad and iPhone? Approximately none. In the world of $1 iFart applications, no-one is even trying to make the kind of large scale, high production value, big budget games we (used to) see on consoles and PC.
Who pirates iPad and iPhone games? Approximately nobody.
Piracy claims are often inflated through the intended operations of the Android and iOS app stores -- with my single iOS purchase I can have it on my iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone. A single Google Play purchase might be on my two Nexus 7s, and then n variants of phone that I've bought over the years. I've heard complainants in such cases compare installs to purchases, using that as the foundation for their piracy claims, when I alone might have installed the app I legitimately purchased 20 times over new and varied devices, and not one of those installs was piracy.
Remember when Dead Trigger did the whole bullshit "piracy is so bad on Android we're going free to play". They then quietly did the same thing on iOS, hilariously justifying their change as some sort of reward for iOS users, instead of the reality that IAP is far more lucrative than upfront purchases.
However supposedly iOS piracy is overwhelming in China.
Who pirates iPad and iPhone games? Approximately nobody. But the problem describe in the article is acute for game publishers regardless of platform.
The public has brought this upon themselves, sure, but more by being cheapskates. And I think Apple has contributed to this as well; their app store design isn't helping.