Hm, difficult to say. I know, my examples were just an few and can't stand against the majority (and I was just teasing you a little ), but my buddies and me visit concerts and buy Shirts and stuff. Not all, but most of the people I know pirating music and real cheapa**es, going on a concert once in a year (maybe) and don't buy any merchandise stuff. But these are just my views in my vicinity. I know what you are trying to say with your explanations. Artist don't earn from cd sales (unless they are Metallica, Nightwish or Nickleback), they make money from concerts and merchandise. Oink.cd? No - haven't heard of him, sorry. Can you provide a link please?
Uhm - share what code? I would share anything, I just have to get the meaning. But your time bomb idea is fantastic. Set the counter to 4 or 5 days after installing. After these days you can maybe see if sales suddenly go up because most of the bombs go bang on day 5. But how do you give each customer a different, his device/ID fitting code?
Yes, I do actually! They were charged guilty and got 10 month of suspended sentence everyone, and had to pay thousands of Euros compensation. They got what they deserved. I was very happy with that verdict.
From what I have read in some developer forums, there is a way to tell if the copy running is cracked. In my next game (which will come soon), I will implement this and share the results with everyone. Links: http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-tutorials/29509-iphone-piracy-protection-code-tutorial.html http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/04/anti-piracy-snippet.html
I have never observed that to be true outside of the effect of hate groups. It only works to isolate people, not bring them into the fold. I guess it depends on what your goal is. The vast majority of the paying base (like me) doesn't care about people pirating the games (at least not in the way you mean). Those customers who do clearly get with developers about it care for the wrong reasons. Selfish ones. If a developer doesn't do anything it is because they feel like they can't do anything. To get angry about that is just piling bad news onto their plate. The only thing the customer should hold the developers to is creating a satisfying experience. The purchase is for that reason only. One can not buy something with the expectation that the developer become a policing force in any way that does not effect user experience. If anyone's experience is ruined by other people pirating the game... well, that person needs to do some serious soul searching. I've heard of dev's doing the timed piracy notice. It seems like an effective way to screw with the pirates. Of course, once it fires the secret is out and that part of the code can be deactivated too, but it'll definitely give pause to people who've pirated the game. Entering an activation code, though, is a horrendous idea. If that is what you are suggesting. It is another way to punish paying customers, while pirates live an easy life. This statement illustrates this man's point. You can't just add those numbers up and say each one is one person. First of all one person could download each of those. Secondly, one person can download many times. Thirdly, one person downloading does not mean successfully pirating the game. A person could download and then not be able to figure it out. This last one is likely a very tiny margin. Another small margin of those people may actually buy the game. Another portion will delete the game or never bother installing it. My point is that while these numbers are terrible, they can't be used to create an remotely accurate estimate of actual losses.
Don´t use serial numbers, they can be cracked or keygenned in most cases anyway and you will only anger your customers in the end. The timebomb idea isn´t a bad one, but it will slow down illegal spreading at best. Codemasters (Fade) and Bluebyte (with the game The Settlers 3) used to do such things in the past, and they haven´t been that successful with it either. I´m not really eager to see a game which phones home either tbh, i wanna play the game instead of having to take part in some survey. I deleted Geo Defense after buying just because it was known for phoning home. Havent installed it ever since. There is a whole blog dedicated to just this topic, so it´s easy to spot them.
For sure. I omitted to make that precision, which I made in another forum with the same topic, sorry. edit : LOL, this article is genius
if piracy is so bad and affecting developers profits..why are we seeing more and more quality games from developers and companies making so many games after another? we are just making a lot of false assumption here. The success of appstore and the gaining popularity of iphone as gaming platform speak for itself isn't it?
Because developers have made piracy a part of their work charge, and now have to work twice the quantity for half the revenue. Which is bad at a side, because some games could be really better if twice the time was spent on them. Increasing number of gamers on iPhone isn't related at all to number of legal sales. I would even say that it's the opposite, considering the subject.
the increase number of gamers also does not mean increase of piracy. it can be increase no. of games per device over a period of time. also can be total no. of legal of iphone vs total no. of jailbreak device. We cannot always look at the same stats all the time also on the other hand, for every legal device, there is a certain number of games they buy and stop there until another good game comes along.
If piracy has such an heavy and bad impact, why do games like Doodle Jump still sell very well, despite the piracy problem every developer has to deal with? You may argue that Doodle Jumps appeals to the casual market, and thus it doesn´t have that amount of piracy happen to it as GTA, but still. It´s a very successful little game, despite the ongoing piracy. With DLC, Apple has given developers a tool to prevent piracy to a certain degree. While it´s not a strong protection, i guess it´s better than nothing at all. As far as i have understood the interesting links exosyphen posted, the info.plist file is being modified on every illegal copy up to date. A custom CRC/MD5 check within the app will reveal if it´s a genuine or a illegal copy. So if the file has been modified, you could trigger your timebomb. Not a bad idea, implent it. I still doubt it will prevent copyright infringement for very long, there are ways to circumvent this for sure. If there is any other method to illegaly distribute a copy than modifying the plist file, your check will never trigger, making the illegal app run exactly like the legitimate one. To really be able to write a hard protection for your app, you need to understand the ways the crackers distribute and modify your app. Almost every coder of decent copy protection mechanisms has some understanding of it. For example, the guy who wrote the protection for Jowood (X-Protect or how they called it) wasn´t exactly a newbie aswell. But here is the problem: How much effort do you want to spend on it? Is it really worth it, and shouldn´t you rather spend your time making a good or even better game for your customers?
You're taking a single example of success as a counterargument to an issue that concerns almost every iPhone app release, and as such it's not really valid. In any case, if you read back along the thread, you'll notice that the impact of piracy hurts the launch of an app, and as such can potentially kill its entire sales. Piracy doesn't prevent success, as there will be 25 apps in the top 25 no matter what. But piracy does have an effect on which games get to be on the top lists. I suspect most developers to utilize plist checks to see how many pirate copies are in use. Any aggressive time bombs etc. will be removed by the pirates as soon as they are found, usually in a day or so. There is very little you can do on that end to prevent illegal copies.
Maybe, but even with this check you can´t argue that every pirate copy would have been a bought legitimate one. There are probably a lot of pirated copies around, depending on how successful and well known the game is. Still i´d be interested on how successful a reminder on those copies would be. Maybe offer the "pirate" a discount for your game from within the app if your check triggers. If i remember correct, Microsoft did something like that in the past. So, if the "pirate" has played your game for about an hour, he´s obviously interested in it. So then, you could come up with the reminder including a link to buy the game, and maybe a discount offer. Who knows, you might turn some of those illegal copies into money.
I'd have to double-check our numbers, but for our polite nag-screen with a purchase link in Stair Dismount, I recall the "success" rate of this action was somewhere between 0.2% and 0.5% of total pirate copies.
Still better than having zero, i´d say. At least some people seem to have decided to buy the app after pirating it. Without the reminder, there wouldn´t even be those 0.2% or 0.5% of all pirated copies around. It might be a small impact, but it´s something at least and if the check can be implented without much hassle, i´d say go for the nag screen.
Not every copy, but if all these pirates suddenly had their cracked apps taken away from them, they'd still be gamers, they'd still be interested in iPhone apps, so many would resort to paying to continue feeding their hobby.
It costs more in man hours to implement the nag screen than you get sales for its presence. "Better than nothing" is unfortunately not a mentality that businesses that pay wages can afford Certainly there's an ethical motivation for the feature to be present.
I don't really know why your point is. I keep hearin the word hate thrown around. If developers want to do something to combat piracy, I support it. If that is a combination of a technical solution while making a moral case againts the behavior on forums such as this, I support that too. I don't know how you can take issue with this.
