App Store Developer Speaks Out On Game Piracy

theguythatwrotethisthing sends in a write-up of his experience releasing an iPhone game on the App Store. By using a software flag to distinguish between high scores submitted by pirates and those submitted by users who purchased the game, the piracy rate is estimated at around 80% during the first week after release. Since a common excuse for piracy is "try before you buy," they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did.

First pirate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Harrr!

App Store Shmapp Store.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my day we were happy to plug in our Atari 2600 and slap in our favourite Space Invaders cartridge. We didn't need no "App store," what is that anyway, some place to buy appetizers? Oh I know, there's an app for that, god damnit Bobby Joe.

Low attention span?

[Veggiesama]

One interesting note is that the most pirate scores are submitted for Story level, then Rounds, then survival. This is the same order that the game types show up in our menus. This may point out that Pirates generally have a lower attention span – they quickly move on to the next game.

There's a really good reason why pirated scores are submitted in that order, and I would tell you, but there's a shiny red ball outside and I gotta catch it.

BRB

Re:Didn't think App Store piracy was that big

[jimicus]

When they finally mailed it out to us, 6 months after billing my company / me thousands of dollars for it,

Is your company in the habit of paying bills for items you haven't received yet?

Re:Didn't think App Store piracy was that big

[ElMiguel]

When they finally mailed it out to us, 6 months after billing my company / me thousands of dollars for it,

Is your company in the habit of paying bills for items you haven't received yet?

And if so, what is your company name and address, please?

Re:Another example

[happy]

We're very open and transparent about our sales, you can see the number of users we have on our homepage. Currently it states 4,378 users.

Re:First pirate!

[Suzuran]

We're all missing the most important question: How is this Apple's fault? It has to be Apple's fault! Everything is Apple's fault!

Re:An interesting corollary

[McGiraf]

There is an error in you math.

Dead people don't get money.

Re:First pirate!

[Seumas]

Personally, I prefer to pay $65 for a game, take it home, unwrap it, put it in my console, play it for ten minutes, then discover that it's complete shit after they've already gotten a nice big chunk of my money.

Also, isn't the app store where guys get insanely rich ripping off "scorched earth" from twenty years ago?