exactly. maybe they should focus more of their attention on creating games that the majority of people would want to play. The people that will actually pay for them. I'm not saying piracy is right or anything like that. I'm just saying that the amount of pirates is very minimal compared to everyone else.
Oh, you know, when you look at some sale figures, 30000 $ per year is totally in range of a good indie (considering he's not exceeding 20-30% of piracy, of course)
You can play with numbers all you like, but the simple truth is that piracy hurts sales. This is from today: http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/iPhone+news/news.asp?c=17778
I get that argument and it’s true. The more interest you have, the bigger is the chance to find something. That’s also why we get the games days or weeks before the majority of people at TA: We are interested. But this does not destroy what I say: If you get 10% of the pirating users, these are still only 300.000. Most of the over 70 million users are still not reached. Instead of fighting a war against the pirating people, you (devs) and Apple should try to make the AppStore a better way to find apps. One approach would be to stop app-spamming. Apple could increase the fee for apps: In the 99$ are only three of five apps included. If you want to publish more apps, you would have to pay 50$ for every new app, you send to Apple. This would not harm most indies, who have less than three or five apps. It would not harm the bigger companies or publishers, because they want to make more money than these 50 bucks. But it would harm the spammers and completely stop the tons of trivia quizzes and other crap, which is currently polluting the AppStore. And maybe it would increase the number of apps which use In-App-Purchases, because instead of 100 trivia apps, you create one and add the content via in-app-purchase. I also thought about using this duplicate functionality thing on apps, which would prevent us from 500 slide games. But this would go too far . Another thing Apple could do is to just check if the app is valid during startup not by signing them, but by comparing the app id with the list of app ids of bought apps. If the app isn’t on the list, don’t execute it. Problem solved .
Once again those numbers are severely skewed. But that has already been discussed to the death. I have a suggestion to help stop piracy for indie developers. I don't know how difficult this is or anything since I have no clue how to program an app. A game like rolando seems to have it figured out. You can download the first level or so for free, and the rest are unlocked through DLC. This is a fantastic idea because as far as I know DLC cannot be cracked. This would stop the pirating, although it would also probably hurt some of your sales because people would be skeptical to download a "lite" version of the game and have to buy everything else seperately. But I do believe DLC may be the way to go for these Indie developers since it cannot be hacked. Although, i'm not sure about this, but they might have to handle all the downloads meaning having their own server to store the content and the people download it from there.
Develop your games using DLC then. It should take some extra steps to pirate those games with full content. But don´t whine if your DLC Games still won´t sell any better. I told you so. I´m sure it can be cracked, but it´s more effort than just uploading game x to a server. If the unlockable content is not in the game folder, at least one person has to purchase it for access. If the whole content is present right away, it can be unlocked by the cracker. Even without looking at the protection, i´m sure that pirating those still requires more effort.
Responding here instead of macrumors since this discussion is moving more slowly. I think the conclusion of 450 million dollars lost is flawed. If you have never analyzed a scientific paper, then you may not realize the numbers game they are playing. Here is a list of the statements they use to draw their conclusions: -over 3 billion applications downloaded -between 13% and 21% of those downloads are from paid applications -apple revenue $60 million and $110 million per quarter *estimate from above is that the average paid app is $3 -Cydia pirate store in August 2009 had over 4 million unique visitors *estimates 10% of all iPhone/iTouches are jailbroken *estimates 7.5 million now have jailbroken devices *Pinch Media estimates that 40% of all jailbroken devices use pirated software -5 developer examples give piracy rates between 75% - 95% *estimate that for every app paid for there must be 3 pirated apps -There are 3 billion downloads from the app store *estimating 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications *Estimate 510 x 3 = 1.53 billion pirated downloads of pay apps -- Multiply the $3 figure from earlier by 1.53 billion pirated downloads -- Oh noes! 4.59 BILLION DOLLARS LOST TO APPLE! Oh wait, lets say only 10% would have been purchased. OH NOES! 459 MILLION LOST! Now lets take a deep breath and look back at those numbers. There are an Awful Lot of Assumptions being made. They assume: -That the 5 developers listed represent the average piracy across all paid iPhone applications. Are you kidding? We're talking about tens of thousands of paid applications being represented by 5? -That every 10th paid application pirated would have been purchased. Clearly someone who has access to pirated free software would be less choosy about what they download. Just look at the Appvent program. I'm sure each of you downloaded free applications whether or not you were going to play them "just to have them in case." -That the average price of pirated paid software was $3. They just disproved that earlier, saying that the higher priced a game was, the more likely it was to be pirated. A better estimate would be utilizing the Average Amount Spent per iDevice owner. Lets say out of every 100 iDevice users, 10 have jailbroken their device and 4 have pirated software. Lets use 700 million as Apple's revenue from the iTunes app store. For every pirateer you have 24 paying customers. If you assume that the pirateer would have purchased similar amounts of software as each of the 24 paying customers, you only get 29.2 million in lost revenue to apple (700/24). That is roughly 4% in lost revenue (which makes sense logically... if you lost 4% of your paying customer base, then you might estimate that you lost 4% of your revenue). I'm assuming certain things such as similar spending habits of a pirateer versus a paying customer. However, I think that's a LOT more likely than a pirateer buying 10% of their downloads. What is missing from this game is the cost to a developer to maintain any user of their program. Servers cost money. If they can tell how many pirated copies access their servers I assume they can also refuse to provide online services for those copies. And they should.
The article doesn't say they took five developers and got an average, it merely lists five examples. You're making your own assumptions now.
It's funny to me...people love to get tied up in numbers, statistics, standard deviations, and other minutae, but seem to ignore the smell test. It's common sense. There are many people who, if given the opportunity, will steal something rather than pay for it. Call it what it is. These people are NOT "trying out" games, then purchasing the ones they like. That's bullshit. We all know it. They may well be deleting ones they don't like, but it's still stealing. None, and I mean NONE of the arguments against piracy have any moral merit. You can delude yourself into thinking that the "big boys" aren't being hurt, but the app store is filled with both big players and small players. Blame Apple for not regulating better if you want, but whether they do or don't, it's still us- consumers who make the moral decisions on whether or not to steal.
I agree, we've had first hand info on these forums from devs whose apps are pirated to extreme percentages, it's not as though we don't know these people, they're among us and the piracy is not doing their business any good. Many people download music for free now too, if the internet suddenly disappeared, would all of these people suddenly stop listening to music completely? No chance, and I'm betting more than 10% would resort to buying CDs again. The percentage may differ with iPhone users, but if they have an interest in apps at all, they'll still want them, free or not.
I agree completely with you. But I don't think any of us are saying that piracy isn't morally wrong. I am completely against piracy, yes I jailbroke my ipod touch, but I pay for all the apps I download. What I am arguing is that yes piracy takes away some sales, BUT I don't think it is enough to make or break a game.
I don´t know how old you are, but back in the days before the internet you made a copy of a LP/Vinly on tape or recorded from radio stations. For Videos there have been VHS Recorders with 2 cassette decks, to take a copy of a movie.
Maybe not if you're EA, but if you talk to forum member bram on the subject he'll tell you about how it almost wrecked his game and how he considered giving in the whole development business. I'm amazed the guy had the strength to carry on and release so many updates. It's a shame cause it's an awesome game as well, it obviously appealed to a lot of people which explains it's popularity on the pirate sites.
to echo the PP, PIRACY IS STEALING! that's what it comes down to. To me, if you're OK with stealing then you're a thief, and that's your choice. You can justify it in whatever way you want. Personally, I believe in the freesharing concept of ideas, but of course, that doesn't pay the bills, so we have to sell our app, or live in a cardboard box under a bridge (which is much less comfortable than you might think). If we did not live in a capitalistic society where people are dependent on the exchange of money for living, then arguments against stealing might have more merit. Honestly, when it comes down to it, you're still taking money out of people's pockets. In one case, that might mean a drop in the bucket, for some indie devs who are really trying to make quality apps and get them out there, it's a big deal. Honestly, I believe, like anything else, it's a personal choice. And, if you make the choice to steal, then at least admit that this is actually what you are doing and don't try to cover it up by saying that it "doesn't make a difference." It's insulting to yourself (you look stupid and make yourself seem insignificant) and insulting to devs who are doing great work and being stolen from. my 2 cents.
So you're telling me piracy isn't more popular with the internet around? That's not believable any way you look at it, practically everyone steals in some way or another now thanks to the incredible ease they can do it with, and not only do more people do it, but each person downloads a higher quantity of music than they would have pirated if they'd had to copy tapes all the time.
I know that I made assumptions in my suggested conclusions and acknowledged that there were assumptions that had to be made. That doesn't detract significantly from my opinion that their estimate was excessive. I did not comment on the ethics of piracy. I did comment that developers can and should do what is within their means to minimize their costs. For the record, I do not want harm to come to developers nor do I think that people should pirate software.
...and yeah, as mentioned before it's all very well trying to pick holes in the statistics and prove piracy as less of a problem, but why bother? All you're doing is lessening the guilt for the people who steal. You guys are talking piracy down to the level of stealing apples, which is only going to make more people think it's not such a crime if they do it. I'm not gonna point fingers but it's obvious that pirates themselves participate in topics like this and try to excuse their behaviour by making it seem like less of a big deal.
I look at the numbers because I think 24/7WallSt is using bad journalism and bad math. I could speculate the reason (more traffic, fearmongering, stupidity) but that's not the current topic of discussion either. How does one value a specific illegal act? By the financial ramifications? In that case, stealing a bag of apples WOULD be equivalent to stealing an application that one would have paid for otherwise. By the ethical ramifications? We could have a field day describing all the personal ethical rulesets and the value attributed to various behaviors. It's illegal. Many people would agree that it's unethical, too. We have laws in place that attempt to deter, and are available to enforce.
Ethical Egoism proponents might say that. Essentially it states that "moral agents ought to do what is in their own self-interest." Evaluating the validity of that philosophy is again, not really on-topic. Suffice it to say, there are people who operate under a different set of ethics than you might be familiar with.
