Closed for Business
mattgemmell.com
Closed for Business
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Closed for Business
#2Your whole article is based on a publicity stunt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280871
Dead trigger makes its money from in-app purchases. In practice it is no more free now than it was before.
Piracy is rampant on iOS too. It's slightly more harder on an iOS device, but it's not exactly difficult.
Re: Closed for Business
#3There are a lot of good points here but one thing I would say is that closer is better for business in the way it exists now.
The overall point - that it's a failure of business models - is one of the two truths that seem to me to be becoming evident in the whole "piracy" debate.
The second (which applies to "consumers") is if there's no valid business model it's highly likely that you're going to see an impact on content creation and availability for platforms where piracy is widespread.
But I find exciting that over the next 10 or 20 years markets will change fairly radically as a result of these things. Personally, I'm no fan of piracy, I think people should be paid for their work. However, I also think that the genie is out of the bottle now and it's going to be a fact of the world going forward and it's for all of us to learn to live with.
Re: Closed for Business
#4"it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness."
That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the underlying kernel be open source.
Re: Closed for Business
#5Your whole article is based on a publicity stunt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280871 Dead trigger makes its money from in-app purchases. In practice it is no more free now than it was before. Piracy is rampant on iOS too. It's slightly more harder on an iOS device, but it's not exactly difficult.
Dead Trigger was a bad example - personally I'm not wild about mixing purchase and in-app purchase at all - but in the overall discussion others stated similar experiences, in one case a developer quoting piracy rates of 90% on an app which I believe had no in-app purchases (sorry, can't find the link now).
Football Manager 2012 handheld will be one I'll watch with interest. The publishers Sports Interactive have said that it has it's targets for Android and if it doesn't hit them there won't be another version. That's a massive franchise (in the UK at least) so I'm keen to see whether it can justify it's existence (selling price $5).
Re: Closed for Business
#6Doesn't Android provide a license verification service, much like the recently discussed iTunes receipt validation process? I have an app, GPS Aids, which checks online if my license is valid. Again, this can be blamed on the developers, for not taking any reasonable steps to prevent piracy. If the app has to be cracked, it's going to reduce the piracy rate quite a bit.
As an aside.. I would never pirate a $1 app, that is just ridiculous. I've spent way more than the average person in the app stores.
Re: Closed for Business
#7"it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness." That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the underlying kernel be open source.
"Existence of some viable open source models doesn’t change the reality for the vast majority of developers. We don’t have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We don’t have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make some more.
"The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn’t sit well with those goals."
Re: Closed for Business
#8Doesn't Android provide a license verification service, much like the recently discussed iTunes receipt validation process? I have an app, GPS Aids, which checks online if my license is valid. Again, this can be blamed on the developers, for not taking any reasonable steps to prevent piracy. If the app has to be cracked, it's going to reduce the piracy rate quite a bit. As an aside.. I would never pirate a $1 app, th…
Yes, and the licensing service is actually one of the most used developer libraries embedded in Android apps ( http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev ), although it's quickly being overtaken by the free + in-app billing model at the moment.
Re: Closed for Business
#9"A price-tag of one dollar is passive smoking. You’re killing people around you, for your own short-term benefit."
They're killing their competition _and_ benefitting from it? Those poor fools!
Re: Closed for Business
#10Your whole article is based on a publicity stunt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280871 Dead trigger makes its money from in-app purchases. In practice it is no more free now than it was before. Piracy is rampant on iOS too. It's slightly more harder on an iOS device, but it's not exactly difficult.
Dead Trigger was a bad example - personally I'm not wild about mixing purchase and in-app purchase at all - but in the overall discussion others stated similar experiences, in one case a developer quoting piracy rates of 90% on an app which I believe had no in-app purchases (sorry, can't find the link now). Football Manager 2012 handheld will be one I'll watch with interest. The publishers Sports Interactive have sai…
That sounds like a much better example. Being an existing franchise, it should avoid what I believe to be the primary problem for both Android and iOS: app discovery.
I remember an anecdote about a 90% piracy rate. It turns out that the game was prominently listed on a popular pirate board, but was buried deeply on the app store.
Combine that with a tendency for pirates to install huge numbers of games that they'll never likely play, and a 90% piracy rate isn't surprising.
Personal anecdote: Massive sales cause me to buy games that I'll likely never play. I just dropped over $50 on Steam because of their massive summer sale. $20 went to the latest Humble Bundle. A few months ago I bought a bunch of games for 10 freaking cents each on the Google store. I've purchased two sequels and one in-app since for those games, but my total outlay is still well under $10.
So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing and discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery, IMO.