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"My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

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Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#81

Post by mattgreenrocks »

schrototo wrote: post #67

Judging from the other comments here this may be a surprisingly unpopular opinion, but if you're pirating an app that costs one fucking dollar you should be ashamed of yourself.

It amuses me that all of the armchair economists come out in force, writing one page dissertations on why piracy is actually efficient for the market at large and creates opportunities while neglecting the fact that the app costs one dollar. One dollar. You pay more for a cup of coffee. All of their time spent being smart on the Internet (which is quite important, I'm led to believe) was more expensive than if they just bought the app (or three) to begin with.

Ridiculous.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#82

Post by ewald »

melvinram wrote: post #59
asdkfj9876 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when did you turn into such a know-it-all patio? All I see from you is arrogant one liners for the last few months. It's been interesting seeing how your (modest) success has turned you into an asshole - shame really.

Patios statement was that moving to SaaS model removes piracy. I see no asshole-ish nature and I'd bet it's 100% on the money, though I've never sold downloadables so I can't speak from experience. Let's stay above name calling. We're all adults here.

And how could he move into SaaS? It's a simple game, not a business app.

I think patio's advice doesn't help at all in this particular case.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#83

Post by gaius »

Derbasti wrote: post #72
w1ntermute wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incorporate features required for a non-Roman script market Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages. Everything's in English, and when people do write in an Indian language, it's using a bastardized, improvised romanization. So non-Roman script support is a non-issue.

Is that true? How interesting! How do you know this? Do you live in India?

The official languages of India are Hindi and English. All government business and most commerce and tech is done in English. You have to remember that what looks like "India" on a map was hundreds of smaller territories unified by the British Empire, and each had its own dialect. It would be impossible to support all of them.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#84

Post by corin_ »

jeffool wrote: post #80

I'd like to point this out: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy To quote: The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see…

That logic doesn't actually add up, though.

Let's say 100 people own iphones, 10 of which are jailbroken. 9 of the jailbroken phones have downloaded my game, and one of the 90 non-jailbroken phones has paid for it. Maybe, if they couldn't download illegally, none of the 9 would have bought it, meaning I have lost 0% of my sales. Or maybe all 9 would have bought it, meaning I have lost 90% of my sales.

It doesn't matter if only 10% of "potential" customers can download a game illegally, it matters what % of likely customers do it. And for some developers that will be much higher than average, for others it will be much lower.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#85

Post by Herald_MJ »

ansy wrote: post #16
crag wrote: post #8

How are they pirating it.. unless they jail-break their phone? I don't do iphone apps, but I was under the impression Apple controlled the distribution?

I'm not sure if it works anymore. But with the App Store you can download on anyone's device after you pay for it once. For example, I buy Angry Birds, and then I log in on your phone and install Angry Birds on it as a free update. Then I log out of your phone, and Angry Birds is still installed. I didn't even know it was possible and I did iOS development. Then I saw someone do it and had a WTF moment. He just said…

You can do this on Steam and PSN also. I don't view this as a significant piracy problem (and apparently neither do Apple, Sony or Valve), because there is an obvious limit of scale. Pirating an app via this method to two or three iphones is fairly trivial, but to distribute it to hundreds or thousands of devices would be a gargantuan task which no-one is likely to do.

Compare this to pirating an .ipa file via bittorrent for jailbroken iphone users, and it's a different story.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#86

Post by jeffool »

corin_ wrote: post #84
jeffool wrote: post #80

I'd like to point this out: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy To quote: The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see…

That logic doesn't actually add up, though. Let's say 100 people own iphones, 10 of which are jailbroken. 9 of the jailbroken phones have downloaded my game, and one of the 90 non-jailbroken phones has paid for it. Maybe, if they couldn't download illegally, none of the 9 would have bought it, meaning I have lost 0% of my sales. Or maybe all 9 would have bought it, meaning I have lost 90% of my sales. It doesn't matt…

You're not wrong that "some customers are harder to sell to than others." But that's a problem anyone trying to sell something faces.

Also worth noting is that he talks about the disproportionate number of games pirated to games sold across the board. What can you take from that? That pirates are far more likely to pirate a larger number of games than customers will buy.

That's hard to prove, but if there are really that many more pirates in so many games, it certainly makes sense.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#88

Post by sgift »

patio11 wrote: post #27

Let me condense the conversation for you: Blah blah blah, free marketing, blah blah blah, wouldn't have bought it anyway, blah blah blah, DRM never works. Then you move your code to the server and this never bothers you again. This defeats piracy so well it works in China .

An interesting property of this approach: The app creator _will_ know if "wouldn't have bought it anyway" is true.

The result may be a shock for some, but at least they have no more illusions ("So many people love my app but pirate it. If they couldn't pirate it they would buy it!") and can get back to work.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#89

Post by mdolon »

schrototo wrote: post #67

Judging from the other comments here this may be a surprisingly unpopular opinion, but if you're pirating an app that costs one fucking dollar you should be ashamed of yourself.

I'm not arguing for or against piracy but keep in mind that even at one dollar these apps can easily add up to a lot. My younger sister, for example, wants to download every cool looking app that she sees in the app store, be it useful or not. Add to that the huge influx of crappy $.99 apps that are not worth even a penny and you have enough incentive for people, especially teenagers with limited budgets, to pirate these cheap apps.

I think in order to solve the problem, it's important to see and understand all sides of the equation, even the ones we don't agree with.

Re: "My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

#90

Post by gonk »

ewald wrote: post #82
melvinram wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patios statement was that moving to SaaS model removes piracy. I see no asshole-ish nature and I'd bet it's 100% on the money, though I've never sold downloadables so I can't speak from experience. Let's stay above name calling. We're all adults here.

And how could he move into SaaS? It's a simple game, not a business app. I think patio's advice doesn't help at all in this particular case.

Its a game that could very well be implemented in a similar fashion to csspivot.com
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