If every month had a theme, the emerging theme for this month would be iPhone piracy. A couple of weeks ago,
ngmoco complained publicly about its games being hit by 50-90 per cent piracy rates in the first week. Then, the other day, Tap Fu developer Smells Like Donkey vented on its blog about
80-90 per cent piracy rates.
And now, acclaimed mobile developer Fishlabs is joining the chorus, claiming on the
Touch Arcade forums that
Rally Master Pro - which hit the App Store earlier today – suffered a piracy rate of 95 per cent. That means only one in twenty players actually paid for it.
Speaking to MobileEnt.biz, Fishlabs CEO Michael Schade reveals how he calculated this figure. "We track UDID's [unique device identifiers] anonymously per day, deduct the reported sales and we have the number of pirated downloads. In this case, many thousands on day one."
He goes on to question the free app/paid DLC model recently enabled by Apple and embraced by several other publishers -
including ngmoco.
"Apple told us in-app purchase is one key against piracy, but I doubt that. We will see in the future how well in-app purchases fight piracy."
Do your bit if you're so inclined, and click 'Buy It!' below.
[TK] ResistanT | 27 October 2009
Soon iphone games will all drown in piracy and the prices on games will eventually rise, so i dont see any advantage in iphone vs ds or psp.
Sk8orDie | 27 October 2009
Well I bought the game :)
Thing is you need to forget how many people have downloaded a pirate version - most of them wouldn't have bought the game anyway and there are loads of people who just download everything as it becomes available.
As an industry we do need to find an effective way of combating piracy - I don't know what that is (I'm an artist not a coder) but I think that changing the attitude of the general gaming public is going to be key, I doubt we will ever find a technical way of stopping piracy completely.
vaga222 | 27 October 2009
Can someone answer this question once and for all. Does the Apple Developer Program allow a company to release a full version of a game for a fee but cripple the game if it's found to be pirated? I know that devs get a list of device ID's when the game is purchased so it would seem like a simple task to check the phones ID when the phone is online with the ones that have been purchased.
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