To all the people claiming that piracy is not lost sales :

one developer here gone bust and had to sleep under a bridge

last i heard he was mauled by wild dogs

 

No, I wouldn't.

That guy was being sarcastic don'tchaknow?

 

The article is wrong. It ignores some little facts: They calculate with 72 million devices of legal customers and 3 million devices of pirating customers and tell you, that if ten percent of these 3 million buy the app, this would be 450 million and therefore, there is a loss of 450 million due to piracy. They completely ignore the HUGE HUGE HUGE bunch of people, who are legal customers, but just don’t buy the app, which are not 300.000, but many many millions of users!

Example:

Rally Master told they have 95% piracy (which is wrong calculated by them). The article mentions 10% jailbroken devices, which are 7.5 million devices. And they take the (wrong) number of 40% piracy from pinch media, which makes their 3 million pirating devices. If you work (like they do) with 75 million devices, this would mean, that 4% of all devices are pirating and 96% don’t. So, if you have about 95% piracy, this means, that 5% of your customers come from a whopping 96% of all users, while 95% of your customers come from 4% of all users. So, the problem is not the piracy, but just the legal customers, who don’t buy the stuff.


-> There is the old appstore-visibility debate again.


Piracy in the AppStore is no problem. Marketing and visibility and app spamming and price wars are the problems. It is a fact, that piracy cannot be a problem, when the number of pirating users is about 4% of all users.




.

 

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?threadid=36772

 

Without meaning to offend anyone.
I am in the games industry for over 8 years as an indie developer.

Every now and then, I here the same BS over and over again:

1.
"I have no experience. I made a game based on [INSERT NAME HERE], because I don't want to waste time on work and design. I released the game and after one month I still can't afford a Ferrari. I blame this on [INSERT VARIOUS ENTITIES HERE]".

2.
"Further, if all pirated copied would have been purchased copies, I could have afforded that Ferrari".

Nobody got reach by cloning an idea in 2 weeks.

Piracy figure are high because everyone will take something if it's for free.
Wouldn't you? If you have to pay for it, you will evaluate it prior to a purchase.

----

Personally I can say that my studio did and does well, and that is how it has been for the past years. I don't drive a Ferrari. But I try to develop "new" game ideas.

I have seen the same "App Store craze" over the past 8 years in various areas. There is always a "get rich quick scheme" in town and the hoard of complainers.

----

Make games out of passion, not out of the need for money.

 

You tell yourself whatever you have to, but don't try telling that to my friend who is a single dev and has calculated thousands lost due to piracy.

This is why I hate pirates. They always try to sit on some moral high ground that they are sticking it to the man or whatever, but in reality, they just want shit for free and will come up with any excuse to justify it. You know, on the app store a lot of the time you aren't stealing from Apple, they won't miss the money, you are stealing from a guy like my friend who struggles to pay rent every month while watching thousands of dollars get siphoned off by jackass pirates.

You know what, if someone mans up and just admits that they steal shit because they want it for free, I can at least halfway respect the honesty. It just boils my blood when you try to justify it with the whole "I'm teaching Apple a lesson" or some such nonsense.

 

Dude ... no offense. But how did your friend calculated those thousands?
I can put up free porn movies on a religious website and everyone will be be downloading it. Now, if I ask them $0.99, I will probably sell none.

99% of people who download a pirated copy, delete it 2 minutes later as they don't like it. Between your friend's figures and my server's logs, I will tend to trust the latest.

Personally, I am HAPPY when our PC game shows up on some torrent. We always get a nice traffic and sales boost. Between 100% of nothing and 2% out of something, I will chose the later.

I know he is your friend, but unfortunately the industry doesn't work on friendships.

 

Piracy rate is calculated from purchases vs. illegal downloads, not illegal downloads vs. all existing devices.

"Pirate downloads don't matter since there are so many people who didn't buy the game." is a very amusing excuse though. I hope you try to develop an app some day.

 

I’m not a pirate. My iPhone is not even jailbroken. And I hate pirates and the whole “it’s to expensive, but I can steal it for free”-attitude. But the numbers tell you, that piracy is nearly non-existant on this platform.

Despite that, the whole idea that every pirate is a loss in money is just wrong. The minority of pirating persons would buy the app. Even the mentioned article calculates with a rate of 10%, which means 300.000 users, who would buy the app if piracy wouldn’t exist. 300.000 are nothing compared to 72.000.000 users, who are willing to pay apps.

The problem with your friend is, that he does not see the problem in not reaching most of the paying customers, but in reaching the non-paying customers. Instead of lamenting on the pirates (less than 4% of all users) he should try to reach the users who would pay (more than 96% of all users).

But if all the devs can do is whining about the miniority of persons who pirate, their app won’t do any better. Their focus is wrong.

I find it rather amusing, when a dev does not reach his paying audience even when the room is filled with this audience and them blaims the fail to the four persons out of 100 who steal the stuff. I mean, wouldn’t you ask yourself, why no one of the other 96 persons wanted to buy the stuff? That’s called marketing.

And regarding the 40% piracy rate on jailbroken devices: That number comes from Pinch Media and if you look at their slides, you will see, that in many times they equal jailbreak with pirates. The 40% are the number of jailbroken devices in China, a market, where most iPhones had to be jailbroken (and unlocked) to be used as a phone, since China had no iPhone. Pinch Media also says, that piracy is no problem of richer countries like the USA. Countries which are more poor have more piracy (but also fewer iPhones). Overall, the Pinch Media numbers are not very accurate. But even if you work with the highest number Pinch Media offers, the market for pirated software in the iPhone and iPod Touch is only a fraction of the market for paid software. And if you fail to reach the market for paid software and only reach some pirating guys who test the app and remove it after a few minutes or days, the problems should be located somewhere else.

 

Did you even read the article? They took all of that into consideration already.

 

Yes, they consider that. They take 10% of all devices (which they say are 75.000.000), then take 40% of them and get the number of devices of pirates. 3.000.000. Which of course makes 72.000.000 devices which NOT use pirated software. Then they take 10% of this and say, when these 10% would have bought the app, this would be 460 million dollars. But 10% of 3.000.000 are my mentioned 300.000 users. They ignore, that besides the piracy discussion we should talk about why most of the paying customers don’t buy. As mentionend and as stated in the article, 96% of the devices out there do not use pirated apps. Hell, 90% of the devices are not even capable of running pirated apps! That’s the lost market, and not the bunch of pirates!

 

No amount of marketing can get you 100% customers. Macs have a market share of under 10% in the US (even worse in other countries). Can you really blame apple`s marketing team for them not having more than 10% market share? Do you think Apple should not worry if the market share drops to 5%? Coz according to you it`s the BIG 90% market share which matters and not the measly 5%. 5% is huge. It`ll halve the apple sales and they`ll go bankrupt if their sales drop to 5% instead of 10%

Your argument is flawed. You say a large amount of people dont buy apps. Pirates on the other hand get the most apps. They have a higher chance of buying an app legitimately (if piracy is not an option anymore) compared to all of the iDevice users. So if 10% of all iDevice owners are buying an app, pirate community will have more than 10% buyers as they are a lot more interested in getting an app.

 

Actually your argument is flawed. Yeah Pirates get the most apps because they are FREE! If they were not free the majority would not have anymore apps than the rest of us. Also... chances are if nobody else is buying the apps, then the few pirates who actually downloaded it would probably not pay money for it anyway.


And to whoever said there friend is strugling to pay the bills off his iphone app. GROW UP AND A GET A REAL JOB! stop living in this fantasy world of making a middle or high class living off of creating games by yourself. If you wish to create games, get a job with an actual company (i'm sure many are hiring) and stop trying to do it all yourself.

If you do wish to continue making apps, do it for fun or as a hobby, not to make a living.

 

Nope. It makes perfect sense. I didnt say they`ll buy all the apps they were pirating. I said they have a higher chance of getting an app compared to average iPhone user as majority still doesnt buy apps. Pirates ARE interested in these apps. They are getting them for free only coz there`s an option to get them free. If piracy is no longer an option then they`ll have more chance of getting an app compared to the average iPhone user. Remember, apps costs 2 bucks on an average. If one can afford a $200+ iDevice, he can also afford a few apps too.

 

lol no i mean that a person should not expect to make a great living off indie iphone game development. It's childish to think so. If there is anyway this is possible, it is to get your name out there so people recognize your name on the apps and want to buy them. This does not happen overnight, it will take months if not years. So in the meantime get a job so you have some money to live off of. This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with piracy.