Quote: "A study conducted by Yankee Group and Skyhook revealed last year that Apple customers download six times more paid apps than Android consumers. It also showed that Android developers make "much less" money from the sales of paid apps than Apple iOS developers -- 75 of those developers blamed the loss of revenue on "rampant piracy." 53-percent of those developers said Google is "too lax" on its Android Market policies, whereas 27-percent saw Android piracy as a "huge problem.""
I don't believe these numbers actually indicate what's going on. I have an ipod touch, and don't really peruse the app market much (mainly just use it for watching netflix), and I was surprised to see that there really aren't any free apps worth much of anything in the Apple iOS store. Maybe a handful of free versions of games that are ad-sponsored versions of paid games. Contrasted with the Android store that has an overwhelmingly large number of free (and also bad, but that's beside the fact) apps. It is only logical to assume that iOS users would buy more apps--there are more apps that are not free in the apple app store.
I use an android phone and an android tablet, and I honestly didn't even know that piracy was a problem. When I find an app worth buying, I buy it. If it looks like crap, I don't buy it (and usually there's a legit free alternative to some extent--in terms of "productivity" apps and the like). To be honest, until this article, I didn't even know there were ways to get paid apps without paying.
Here's the thing--if a game is $0.99, and the dev is complaining that they are not getting the revenue they were expecting and that it's due to piracy, I honestly refuse to believe that the game would otherwise have done well. $0.99 is a throw-away purchase. If the game looked to be any good at all, people would buy it. If it wasn't, they won't. It's not like we're talking about a $100 game here. Most people don't think twice to buy a $0.99 game.
This all just reeks as an excuse for not producing the product they thought would net money. SOOOOO many other games and apps are extremely successful despite this "rampant piracy." Explain that.
[citation][nom]nhat11[/nom]So if the same game gets released on 2 different platforms one on droid, the other on the ipad and the ipad version does better (same pricing too and same exact game and performance). What factors made the ipad version sell better than the droid version?[/citation]
I would honestly say it's due to an entirely different userbase. What you really need to see is the general distribution of who buys similar games on similar platforms. Like I mentioned, there have been extraordinarily successful similar games on Android, which lends some weight to the quality of the game being the problem, not the ability to pirate it.