iPhone Game Developer Claims 90% Piracy Rate

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rodney_ws

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Well, clearly this company should place more restrictive controls on their software in order to force these people to purchase it. If it makes it a little more difficult for the actual paying customers who cares?!? You gotta keep those pirates from playing with your game for free!
 

JasonAkkerman

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[citation][nom]rodney_ws[/nom]Well, clearly this company should place more restrictive controls on their software in order to force these people to purchase it. If it makes it a little more difficult for the actual paying customers who cares?!? You gotta keep those pirates from playing with your game for free![/citation]

There is no way to fully copyright any piece of software that can't be bypassed. Developers know this. Yet they keep stacking more and more copy protection, and DRM into everything. It only serves to make the experience more complicated and unpleasant for the legit users.

There will always be piracy. Either find a pricing scale, or business model that works around it.
 

fulle

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I'm not sure if rodney is being serious or not, because some people are actually that fucking stupid.

Assuming he's a a useless piece of existence who shouldn't be allowed to speak, the problem is that if protections are put into the software, the pirates will just remove that and steal the software anyway. The difference here would be that the pirate would be playing an unprotected, less hassle version, while the paying user would have to suffer through hoop jumping for no benefit to the developer. Even less people end up paying for the game, and everyone loses.
 

cybrcatter

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[citation][nom]fulle[/nom]I'm not sure if rodney is being serious or not, because some people are actually that fucking stupid.Assuming he's a a useless piece of existence who shouldn't be allowed to speak, the problem is that if protections are put into the software, the pirates will just remove that and steal the software anyway. The difference here would be that the pirate would be playing an unprotected, less hassle version, while the paying user would have to suffer through hoop jumping for no benefit to the developer. Even less people end up paying for the game, and everyone loses.[/citation]

Minus the derogatory assault, I completely agree with you.
The most basic example being no-DVD cracks. Why should I have to sift though dozens of spindles and hundreds of disks, load the one I need into my drive, and wait for a program that's already fully installed on my pc to read the disk, while someone with a cracked version can just click and play? Now I even have to jump through the Games for Windows Live hoop to play
an offline game.

Copy protection software really only hurts one demographic: the paying consumer.
 

gpj

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Smells Like Donkey .. Pirates don't steal games and apps to "try before they buy." And the ones that say that are outright liars.

So you and the rest of the corporate world (like the movie & music industries) can cry about all the lost revenue .. or start to ask yourself why people aren't buying your crap in the first place? You have helped create the world we live in (one of consumerism) and need to accept the consequences. I.e. some people won't pay for shitty music, movies, games, apps and some people will!
 
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piracy shall be prevalent forever. they will never stop it on any platform. it is a futile effort on the part of the developers.
 

dheadley

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Actually, I don't see why the applications aren't tied to your iPhone/iPod in some way. When you click on an icon to purchase the iTunes store should know what device is requesting the app and could include a point of sale compiled bit of code embedded into the application that only allows it to work with that device. If you change devices just remove the old unit and authorize the new one in iTunes. When you go to sync the applications to your new iPhone/iPod iTunes then contacts the server to get the embedded bits for the new device. Same with applications that you purchase at the computer and then add to the device during sync.

Everyone wants to do things like buy an app once and share it with your family and friends, but really the developers should be getting paid for every single instance of the app being used.
 

blasterth

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when you buy an ipod or an iphones the first thing to do is hack them to improve their functionalities. After this mandatory first step, pirating the soft is just a normal consequence.
 

dheadley

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BTW to those above that try to make out pirating as the fault of the developers all I have to say is that if an application isn't worth buying, then its not really worth stealing. Any comments to the contrary are just people trying to justify their actions that they know to be wrong.
 

AdamB5000

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It's like the World of Goo guys said - they think that only 20% of people that own the game paid for it, yet they still made a profit and they think that most of the 80% wouldn't have purchased it even if piracy wasn't an issue. They claim that excessive software protection would have hurt their sales more than it would have helped.

So I argue that most of the illegitimate copies of this iphone game wouldn't have been downloaded even if pirating was not an option.

I'm not saying that we should ignore piracy, but 90% the piracy stories are overblown and 10% of the time the truth sets us free.
 

tayb

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You guys needs to quit your bitching about DRM and copy protection. Clearly none of you have any works on the iTunes App store or have ever sold anything of value digitally.

Who struck first? The DRM or the thieves? If I spend hundreds of hours working on an application only to find out that 90% of the people using it or playing it STOLE IT I have a right to be pissed and a right to place some copy protection on my software.

If you idiots stopped stealing the DRM would go away because there would be no need for it. But, ironically, instead of blaming the thieves (probably yourselves) you blame the companies who put in the hard work making the games for TRYING TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF THEIR WORK. This is not Soviet Russia. If I make a game it's because I want to make money selling it.

Next time you want to complain about DRM start bitching about the people stealing it because it's THEIR FAULT. 10000% THEIR FAULT.
 
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Piracy rates are not directly correlated to lost sales. Don't assume just because someone pirates a game that they would have bought it.
 

core i7 ownage

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[citation][nom]spanspace[/nom]maybe they should put a kill code into their game so if detected as pirated it shuts down.[/citation]
Developers did that, like EA games, RA2 (not sure of other versions). Program would check if game is not pirated. If game is pirated, and upon starting game and everyone would died. Basically, it didn't work, hackers found another way around it. Like removing kill code.
 

JonathanDeane

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I still think a better term would be counterfeit software as your making a copy. 90% ouch... Each time I see articles like this I want to know if they sold 1,000 copies or 10,000,000 copies. If its 1,000 then that sucks bad and you only managed to sell 100 copies but out of ten million you still sold a million copies so annoying yes but still you at least get to eat. Part of the try before you buy culture got a huge boost due to review sites becoming corrupted. I can find reviews of software that just is glowing but you go out and buy it only to find that the review was full of crap.

I myself hardly bother any more if I cannot find some one online to ask or a person to ask in person about a piece of software I do not waste my time. (Amazingly youtube has become a decent review site for amateur reviews and I trust those more then I do the online professional sources)

Another annoying thing for this developer must be that both the iPod touch and the iPhone are fairly expensive so unless these people stole it from a friend or a store they probably have the money to buy this stuff if they wanted too.
 
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The internet is what it is. It will NEVER change. If you are going to try to make money on it you are accepting that will happen. Don't like it? then stop making it. The internet isn't yours. It isn't apples. It isn't the gvnmt's. Stop telling me how to use it and my computer.

DRM is just another game to try to solve and unlock.
 
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