Morals are not something you can force on another. Is that so hard to understand. If you want someone to adapt your moral perspective you have a 0.00% chance of doing it by ostracizing and bullying the person. I'm not against your message, I'm against your method. I think it will only hurt the cause.
Actually... This is being done in history, now, and probably will continue to be done in the future. It's success rate is of course, dependent on many many factors, the key of it your enlightenment level, and the relative difference between your status/power and his. In the same light, law enforcement is the ONLY way piracy can be fought, or at least, it is the most important factor that MUST exist in order for anti-piracy to have any chance at all. Drugs, Frauds, Robbery, Murders, Theft. There is a risk if you do any of these, as the law may catch up with you. Download? Doesn't seem very risky if you ask me. Without law enforcement, like what the internet piracy is like nowadays, simply encourages people to steal. And that is that. All the talking and marketing and educating will help, yes, but it will not be fast enough to help many of the industries to survive. Just my two cents.
Actually, I also said I support a combination. Who cares. All I can do is say the behavior is wrong. It's my opinion. You have tried to convince me through your own version of a moral arguement that I am misguided. If, as you claim, moral arguements alone won't work, then you know your wasting your time. Take your own advice and move on. If you just enjoy pointless arguements, google the word argue and go to town. BTW are you related to Jack Link?
You can't say "every pirated copy would've been bought," because that's not true, "but you can't say no copy would've been bought," because there are many, many pirates that do love the platform and would buy the games if 'forced.'
I'm not sure in what way you mean. The idea is to change the mindset of people who pirate, not bully them into pirating out of sight. Morals can not be forced. Punishments for falling out of line with establish social codes does not making people adapt morals and therefore is fairly meaningless in terms of positive social change. And if you don't believe that, then you've clearly never looked recidivism rates. Creating a "war on piracy" like the "war on drugs" is likely to have a similarly abysmal result. The policing and justice systems are already over taxed without creating millions of new criminals. Where does the funding and manpower for such a set of laws come? America has the worlds largest prison population. Do you think the system can handle a new influx? I don't think it is a feasible strategy. But if you can show me where the money, training, equipment, and space to catch and detain these new criminals will come from it might be easier to accept as a possible solution. Though I'd still think it would only serve to drive pirates further underground instead of stopping them. No relation to any Jacks. Sorry to disappoint any beef jerky fans out there. I'm not saying that sharing your opinion is wrong, I'm saying that hostility is not the best tool to implement change. Preaching is fine, thuggery isn't (not saying you are a thug). You can't force morals, but you can sway them. If you put a gun to my head and told me to write a symphony you'd be unhappy with the result. If you taught me how to write a symphony first and then asked me to do it the success rate improves enormously.
every game platform have its piracy problems and will always be there. We all have to live with these and move on. The number of people going for pirated stuff are always there and there is no way to stop it. as long the game is of quality and pleased the masses, you will have profit. of course not everygame will be in the limelight all the time. but your game will get its chance if is good. The problem now is the free and lite versions. i see that most legal users will download mostly lite versions than paying for a game unless it is really that good. to them, having a few good lite games is good enough for the short term. and looking at the games being developed, i can dare to say most games are making profit. and the appstore is all about franchise. if you can make good games people will buy your game and follow you. Chillingo is a very good example. They made quality games and have capture the market share of the games in appstore.
@jonlink: lol. I can respect your opinion. I also don't advocate putting a gun to anyone's head. In my experience, calling bad behavior what it is can reach some. When I have made mistakes, getting called on it has worked. This probably won't work with everyone. That's not where a thread like this will work, but there are some it may reach. IMO, it's worth it to try.
I can see 2 big problems in every thread about piracy : 1) Systematically contested actions against piracy. Whatever the action a dev takes against piracy is always contested by the majority. May it be sueing, DRM, serial number activation, application shutdown, or whatever I saw in more than 3 threads made of at least 20 pages, it is contested and barely supported. The point is not to shut our mouth and say yes to every countermeasure, the point is that time is running. While a dev can be engineering all the brains of the world to search for perfection in fighting digital rights infrigements, there will still be digital rights infrigements. And it's growing fast. So action must taken (we don't the key we'll break in). I understand that we have to find the best solution ever. But meanwhile, please understand that we also have to defend ourselves. That's why I think in such discussions when it comes to talk about countermeasures, any contestation, any judgment, and any negativism are plainly useless. Even more : they will force the discussion to become a living battlefield, as devs might feel left alone (or even cheated by suspicious nay-sayers). If one doesn't agree, he doesn't have to be rude, or wall-of-texting, or go all "Leave pirates alone !" Chris Crocker style. Do you imagine yourself saying to a girl who's being robbed her bag something like : "No, wait a minute before calling the police ! There should be a better way where everybody will end in happiness. Because here you're doin it wrong and blah blah blah could be better if blah blah blah, don't you think ? oh there's also this blah blah blah and whatever but ..." and the bag is already miles away. So, back to piracy discussions, the really clever and useful intervention is what Exosyphen did here : solution proposals. In a mature world, a debate only elevates if people are making propositions. 2) Other big problem is the number 1 argument creeping in negative interventions : "You base your anti-piracy actions on assumptions." Well, let's make it clear : Unless one got every statistics about legal and illegal downloads of the world, there will always be assumptions. And if you look at posts closely, even people who rise against assumptions are making themselves assumptions. Sample : I won't dig out all the other assumption things in this thread, but please, let's be honest : As Digital Rights enforcers will always hide themselves, everything that is based around piracy will be based around assumption. Let's accept it and move on to solutions. Of course, assuming is not relevant, and that's why most of the concerned devs are gold digging any reports, stats and analysis they find on the web.
While i understand some complaints, this thread basically circles around the same outcry over and over. Let´s face it, you have decided to develop for the iDevice. You knew that it´s possible to illegally acclaim games on this platform, you´ve also been aware to the fact that the asking price for an iPhone game is pretty low compared to other platforms. This is public information, still you choose to develop for the iDevice. Every developer has to deal with this facts, even Rockstar has to sell their GTA game for a few bucks. Apple offers the option for everyone to develop his/her apps on the iDevice with ease, you don´t need to go through the complex process of acquiring an SDK. Have you ever tried to get an official license to develop for the Nintendo DS or the Wii? Good luck to you! I wonder why noone mentions this advantage. I don´t wanna be harsh, but at some times i´m led to believe that all some of you do is cry, instead of mentioning and honoring the advantages of this platform. Deal with the facts, you have a great supporting crowd of customers in this very forum, you get in touch with people who spend their free time helping beta test or translate your app. When developing for the iDevice, you don´t have to go through all that complex legal mumbo jumbo, you don´t need an SDK, you don´t need to be an official developer. You can keep in touch with your customers and vice versa. With the introduction of DLC, Apple has given you the option to breath new life into an old app by adding new content while working against piracy at the very same time. Don´t forget that "The Creeps" earned back a top spot by utilizing DLC in a clever way. Apple even gives you two options. You may supply the missing DLC content to your customer, or, to save yourself valueable and expensive bandwidth, you can also choose to upload the full game with the whole DLC content, which will then be unlocked by Apples Servers. The way you implement it is entirely up to you. By providing Promo Codes you can further advertise your app, as some users will twitter about it, write reviews in their blogs, or at least leave a positive review in the App Store. Speaking of reviews, Apple only allows customers to leave those, protecting your app from guys who would just leave random comments. Last but certainly not least, we don´t have an huge amount of big companys developing for the iDevice at the moment, so the competition is not even closely as high as it is on other systems (DS, PSP, whatever). Thinking about it, it should be every Indies Paradise really. It baffles me how some developers neglect all those advantages, and cry about piracy in case their game doesn´t sell all too well. Apple has handed you the tools to prevent illegal downloading of your apps, you just have to use it. With or without piracy, believe me, you won´t get a millionaire over night just by selling iPhone apps. Some of you complain that it´s hard to stay in a top spot on the App Store. Well, while that might be true, it´s the price you have to pay for developing for the iDevice. Apple isn´t Nintendo, anyone can supply his/her app. You just need to meet the hardware requirements, that´s it. It´s a good thing, because otherwise we wouldn´t see 99% of your games in the App Store at all. In my opinion it´s working, as it converted some users into paying customers. I don´t really understand why you don´t utilize this idea. Think about it, Microsoft has used this method aswell. They "bribed" "pirates" into buying a Windows license. Heck, they even offered them a discount.
Doing software piracy the right way, society actually rewards you instead of punishing you. Do you know? The Pirate Bay has been found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online by a Swedish court on April 17 2009 and have been sentenced to a year in jail and a $3.6 million fine. As conclusive proof of the commercial profitability of The Pirate Bay, the founders of the site have sold it to a company called Global Gaming Factory X for $7.8 million in June 2009. These are the things making me quite nervous... I've seen the piracy debate evolve a great deal over the years. A few years ago people would firmly deny that piracy was anything more than just a few people doing it. Then eventually as a range of data such as the number of torrent downloads made it painfully obvious that it was actually being conducted on a huge scale, the next argument to be trotted out was that it may be large, but it doesn't really result in any lost sales. Now that we have sales figures showing huge differentials between PCs and console game sales despite roughly the same install bases for each platform, the argument has devolved into simply blaming the greedy developers and publishers for making crappy games and using DRM. Of course even good games by struggling developers with no DRM are heavily pirated, so I wonder what's next. I believe most people justify piracy on the basis that it's a victimless crime, "like punching someone in the dark". The irony is that the real victims of piracy may end up being gamers. With the Culture of Piracy so prominent now, it seems everyone is demanding freedom without understanding that freedom does not equal free; everything has a cost, and we need to recognize that if content creators provide us with entertainment, they need to be rewarded fairly for it. We need to demonstrate that we can exercise the freedoms we have responsibly if we don't want to lose them. People can conjure up all manner of excuses to justify rampant piracy all day long, however neither the data nor logic bear any of these excuses out in the end.
yeah, if u guys as developers cared that much about piracy, u would implement Apple's API that stops the owner that has a cracked version from using the app. This is only in some apps though so far, like BeeJive and Adrenaline Golf. theres no point to whine about it here. u can stop it because has given u the tools to stop it. (ur app checks teh device's UUID and verifies it with the server) if its not verified, the app will not work. and pirates usually target apps in the top 25 or ones mentioned on TA. small games that few people have heard of (no offense to Devs but there are thousands of those, and some of them are very good and should be in the top 25, but no one knows) generally dont sell very well, and dont even get pirated that often. There are around 10,000 apps on ********/AppTrackr. There are over 120,000 on the apps store. that means theres is an 11/12 chance ur app wont be pirated anyway.
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/memberd.1.html http://thwart-ipa-cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html http://www.tuaw.com/2009/03/09/iphone-app-phones-home-to-foil-pirates/ http://www.tuaw.com/2009/02/11/ripdev-launches-anti-piracy-service-for-iphone-developers/ and of course this nice tutorial: http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-tutorials/36330-iphone-piracy-protection-code-2-another-tutorial.html Maybe it is that what you're looking for? Counter measures ftw!
You cannot stop piracy. It is a fact of life. Whatever you do, there will be piracy. So you might as well make the most of it...
Don´t forget that the UUID can be changed/faked though. Still, i somehow love the idea of the nag screen, the comment with the "1 year old baby" almost brought me to tears. Seriously, i like it because it doesn´t dehumanize "software pirates" as some obscure creatures of the night which need to be stabbed in the back. I´m sure the message reaches many mothers and fathers, they´ll feel with the dev and eventually you managed to turn a switch. Never forget you are talking to people. Respect is no one way street, think about it.
Ah, ok, I understand now I thought iPhondTouch3G meant that Apple was giving access to their own UUID server base via API. Which would be a better solution imho, as we could then check who bought the app internally, by synchronizing the device ID with Apple registered IDs for this app. Actually, I'm in talk with Apple to negociate if this solution could be real. You mean, like crimes and murders ?
