What I get out of the complaints from people about PinchMedia is that the actual piracy numbers are actually much higher than reported on PinchMedia, since many pirates and people with jailbroken phones are also using third party software to block PinchMedia reporting. So I guess the piracy numbers being reported by PinchMedia should be assumed to be on the low side.
Well, big news! Apple now accepts in-app purchases for free apps. read front page news. So hopefully this will put an end to piracy
Well, I'm not very well educted on how the in app purchases work but from the article it seems that when you buy more content, it has to verify your purchase. So they can release a free version of their game with say...3 levels. Then if you want to buy the full game, you pay your .99 cents and unlock all 10 levels. This way if a pirated applications makes it through, they only get the 3 levels like everyone else. I'm not entirely sure if this means that the apps with dlc will not be able to be pirated once content has been bought. It seems like they wouldnt be able to run since apple needs to verify the in-app purchases but I guess we'll have to wait and see
Apps can request signed (encrypted) receipts from apple for the purchase of the "real" app, above and beyond the trial version. They can make it so that they need this receipt to function. This obviously just changes the place where the crackers need to target, but it's sure a whole f* of a lot harder to do cracks like this rather than a plist crack. If Apple was smart, they'd make it so that you just couldn't download the apps on your computer whatsoever, and make all the "backups" contain stubs (extremely restricted information about the particular app, version, etc) of the actual application files. This would of course need an actually-secure hardware platform to function fully. Piracy is incredibly difficult to prevent, and over the short term actually impossible, since everything can be broken down into binary, and that can be gotten to physically in numerous ways. It's the threshold of making it much more difficult to crack that they're succeeding for with this. You'll literally need a hex editor and custom software to do any more hacks (not like these tools don't exist, they're just not a one-button cracking process as has been the case so far) Chris.
Additionally, say you have the actual graphics files on the server. Someone would need to crack after they'd downloaded all the content, and release new cracks for each content update.
Very good and analytic post Spiffyone. Also, yes, most actual companies resisted to piracy. Guess what ? 1) Because they are still on line (pure logic, sorry for that). 2) Because they are companies. But before becoming a well-sized company, you start from one person, or a bit more. And would people talk about dead / dying start-ups ? You know the answer My actual dayjob is in a planned-to-be game company, and I can't tell you how much a long road it is to put things in place, starting from confidence in risk taking. Today even the biggest and oldest studios are falling down.... So can you imagine how are going the modest ones ? And on the bottom of the foodchain, we got Indies, who got to have deadened nerves to hold tight in growing. But that would be if they had solid revenues, and weren't facing that outrageous 60% piracy number. Finally, another point : we are justifying about the value of potential losses. But for the sake of respect, why aren't we talking about the beginning ... like ... you know, just deserved revenues .. ? If a studio / indie makes one million in a month, isn't it because they deserved it ? Isn't it because they put so much sweat & tears into it that the final product stands enough to be what we call a success ? Nobody's forcing sales anywhere... So that's an honest income, do we agree ? And where everybody wins is that it only costs you the same as a beer. edit : requiring downloadable content is the ultimate weapon, for sure Chris, but you just can't force iTouch users to have a wifi connection every time :/
Pinch media results You guys should give this article a read.. It pretty interesting.. It seems that most pirated apps on iPhone DO come from outside US and UK.. Not only that but there's a roughly .50 conversion rate from pirate to legitamet vs. A 7.0 percent Trial to full (apps and games). There are roughly 4 million jailbroken iPhones And 38% that pirate. And of that 38%, there are roughly 2-3% that purchase the pirate apps.. This is a graph showing the amount of jailbroken iPhones in each country.. Take a read... http://www.iphonehacks.com/2009/10/new-study-reports-38-of-jailbroken-iphones-have-pirated-iphone-apps-installed.html
usually the cracked games are the beta ones with bugs, so its not a full game. people who get all their apps cracked should treat the cracked apps lilke lite versions and after so long make a decioson wheather not to buy it. then if u don't like it u don't waste $ but if u like it u should buy
That's like saying the number of men bedding your wife while you are away at work does not in any way represent actual loss of sex for you.
+1 for me. LOL. But back to the point. It wasn't the first time i'd saw the argument that piracy doesn't cause any lost of sales. There are statistical proof to back the argument but that doesn't make it right and it shouldn't be used as a retort for developers trying to stop it. Just a tibit for everyone. If everybody on this planets uses genuine Windows OS and never downloads any cracked applications, the number of virus on the platform would be decimated (assuming everyone turns auto-update on. MS should just make that mandatory) People scream and cry foul at MS when their emails bombed or their work got lost. They forgot to mention they recently download illegal versions of MS Office with a seemingly innocent keygen exe file that they ran to generate an illegal key.
When i think about this topic the thing that really throws me off is when you think about the ratio of people who jailbreak their device versus those that do not. I believe I saw somewhere that out off all idevice owners (iphone and ipod touch, all generations) something like 8-10% of the entire community jailbreak. Please someone correct me if this is not accurate. Out of that 8-10% of people that jailbreak (I don't care what anyone says) I know that not everyone is pirating apps. For the sake of argument, let's say 1/2 of all jailbreakers pirate apps. We are looking at 4-5% of the entire idevice community, that are pirating apps. Personally, I wouldn't think that 4-5% would be worth worrying about too much. But then I see comments from Dev's that just make me go 'huh'. Tap-Fu for instance. I believe the Dev, Knight, said he has seen via online scoreboards something around 85% of the Tap-Fu players are using a cracked version. First of all that is fu$^%$ sad... I feel bad for the Dev's who made a great game and they are watching as people steal it for free, while they sit back unable to do anything about it. I can't even imagine how frustrating that must be... But this information kind of goes against my above logic. If the numbers stand true this makes for a somewhat odd scenario, in my mind at least. The 4-5% of pirates = about 85% of user base for a game! The Dev for Tap-Fu said sales are not going so well, so they put it on sale... but still I find those numbers astounding. If there is a very small legitimate user base then it makes sense... but still it doesn't seem right. I haven't read this whole thread but it would be interesting to see how the numbers play out around pirates vs. legit with a game that has a large, legitimate user base. Thoughts?
When you are getting the games for free, you tend to download everything you see. Most of the pirates are going to download each and every app they find even remotely interesting. The rest of us folks who have to pay arent going to buy each and every game coz even 99cents tend to pile up and it`s hard to pay when you arent really sure if you`ll be spending enough time with it. Case in point ... ME. I download almost every game which goes free unless it looks real crap. But how much time do I spend with them? 10 minuts on an average will be an over-statement. But since it`s free, I download them all just in case one of them turns out to be awesome as alll it takes is a click of the mouse. If I play it then fine, and no real harm done even in case I dont. So I guess those figures, though admittedly a little extreme, could still be possible. Even if the dev is exaggerating a bit, I`d say atleast 50-60 % of gamers are using pirated version of a game.
From my experience piracy is not really hurting sales. Most people that download the games for free only spend a fraction of the time on actual playing the games compared to honest purchases. You can see that especially on the release date when you have a lot of people pirating, a few days later you find almost no one pirating it. The biggest problem is when a dev wants to add chat or ways to communicate (online games) and you have people trying to convince the honest purchasers to jailbreak and download games for free, and laughing at them for spending money on games. Since DinoSmash we are completely blocking such people from chat. We have wished since day one that Apple adds some way to verify honest purchases on server-side, and the in-app purchases allow that. To people without wifi: get it, or you are missing 90% of the fun on the device.
The only app I got cracked was EDGE back when it was off the app store... I bought it the second it came back on the app store.
I just wanted to chime in here since you guys mentioned me and our game. We are not exaggerating, and while it surprises us, I think its makes sense given the scenario. Tap-Fu just came out, so all the 'warez' sites would have it up on their front page (think new movies and torrent seeders). So people download it, play it for a bit, upload a score, and go to the next app. But since our price was 'high' legitimate users were more choosy with their purchasers and so we have less of them. Also remember that most people don't want to submit their scores online. I personally don't do it for games I play unless I am directly competing with friends or I am really good at it. Its possible that pirates are more willing to submit their scores than legit users. But what you guys said about the piracy market not even being a market is correct. I don't think they would have bought the game even if they could play it for free and afford it. The reason I posted the stats is to show how bad the ratio was for us. But I think over time this ratio would improve to be a bit more balanced toward legitimate users.
