Piracy strikes iPhone’s Whack ‘em All game

Only yesterday Pocket Gamer was discussing the nature of piracy on the Nintendo DS, and today we hear that the iPhone is similarly afflicted – with a particular case drawn against James Bossert’s £0.59 Whack 'em All app.

The game, which took 250 hours to create and was released on Christmas Eve 2008, gained 400 new users in a single day, which suited Bossert no end until he discovered that only 12 had actually paid for it through iTunes.

The developer quickly found the source of the game’s illegal distribution, and published the response he received from the hacker:

“You cannot accuse me … because all of them would have not purchased your application anyway," the hacker known as most_uniQue said in reply to Bossert’s email.

"[I] only want to give public the chance to try out your game before spending their money. I at first did not crack any games but after I purchased a few games which were not as good as the description let me believe I wanted to help others not to waste their money on something which even has no return policy. To solve this problem ... talk to Apple.”

Cracking an iPhone app is apparently quite a simple matter, with a single click application (we think it’d be in bad taste to make mention of it here) allowing it to be distributed freely among jailbroken handsets.

Seeing no other option for recouping the costs of development, Bossert is now considering making his app free to play, and funded by advertisements.