iPhone: “Every developer is losing sales”
Just how rife is app piracy?
Smells Like Donkey, an independent iPhone studio formed last year, claims that its latest game has been illegally downloaded by 90 per cent of its players.
By tracking information through Tap-Fu’s online scoreboards, the developers could determine which copies were legit and which had been pirated – and the results were heavily slanted in favour of pirated copies.
A post on the Smells Like Donkey blog states: “You are devastated when you realize that you are getting totally screwed over. Despite what you’ve heard from others, your game isn’t being bought but it is being played.”
The developer also claims that none of the pirated copies led to players buying the game legitimately, which goes against the arguments of some pirates that they like to try games (illegally) before buying them.
According to Smells Like Donkey, the process of pirating an app to a jailbroken iPhone is easier than it is to download the game from iTunes, and pirate versions of games begin to appear on download sites within 40 minutes of their release.
The developer also notes that Apple has been “fairly slow” to respond to the issue of app piracy, and predicts that developers themselves will be the ones to come up with preventative measures including paid-for DLC and online verification.
The blog concludes with this statement: “Now that all that is said and done, are we really concerned about it? Maybe a bit. We like to think that it’s not us specifically that is losing sales to these people, it’s every developer that is losing sales to these people. The pirates have essentially removed themselves from the iTunes economy and that hurts everyone.
“How much does it hurt? Probably not a whole lot. There’s probably a few of these people that would have bought our game in the first place so it’s not really a big deal.
“But as a developer, looking at that high scores chart, it is kind of depressing. Yet we are glad that there are plenty of paying customers out there, and we will do our best to reach them.”
tl;dr version of developers blog.
“We made a game for the iPhone thinking that we’d milk the saps, I mean customers, for 4 dollars a pop and are stunned that people don’t buy every one of the million App Store apps the day they’re released”
I mean seriously, come on, they’re basing this one their first week of sales? Of course the pirated units are going to be higher, pirates download the game, take it for a spin and move on. If the game is still being played in a weeks times they’ll be seeing differant figures.