Has anyone had their game illegally Downloaded ?
I have found a few website that are downloading my game illegally and was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and how do you feel about it ?
[link removed]
^^ Here is a site I found when I typed my APPs name (Ryu Kazuhiko ZS) in Google ^^
I presume almost all games are illegally downloadable somewhere?
OH they are ? OH, well this makes me feel a little better I guess…
Yea, most games can probably be found for download somewhere. I wouldn’t worry about it too much as those people downloading it probably wouldn’t have ever bought it anyway.
My stuff’s always pirated. puffs chest out in pride
@ XCO
Normally, if your game is being pirated alot, for a while now.
It could mean that your game is really that good. 
Cheers!
Thanx guys, I wasn’t sure what too feel lol
WIthin 24 hours of releasing Master Thief for Android I found a review site that had reviewed my game… and was linking to it for dodgy download.
I emailed the reviewer, thanked him for his positive review, and asked what was up with the link to a dodgy download of my game. He said he had no idea that my game was for sale, apologized, and changed the link to use Google Play instead.
I don’t know about iTunes, but there are sites that (automatically?) monitor and rip copies of stuff uploaded to Google Play and post them for anyone to download. I think I’d seen my game in one of those lists within an hour of uploading it.
Do what you want, 'cause a pirate is free,
You are a pirate!
Well, I’ve helped Unity customers who’ve told me that their iOS games are released by Apple in New Zealand at the start of their day. Their games are ripped and made available on crack site even before the game is released on the AppStore in Europe.
I think the only way to avoid piracy is to require the game to download things from a server you host - perhaps asset bundles, or data of some kind. You can then at least tag where in the world people are connecting from.
Yeah, lots. I’ve also had my game cloned on the Google Play store too. Twice. Which really pisses me off.
We even had our free Android game pirated! I noticed a massive amount of downloads in Applovin and Chartboost that didn’t line up with the numbers in Google’s developer console. I would have never known why except Applovin automatically imports the games and I noticed that there were four or five bundle id’s that didn’t belong to our game in the list. Most of them from Chinese stores. It’s a bit annoying that the game was thousands of times more successful from people that were driving down our eCPM numbers, and worse, the conversion ratio that advertising use to decide whether or not to drop you, because they were from a country that mostly don’t have Google Play. I’d rather have a paid game pirated, because that doesn’t drive down monetization of other users.
Every single game I’ve worked on since 1994 has been pirated in one way or another. It comes with the territory.
And you couldn’t change providers or something to take advantage of the situation? That sucks. However, it’s potentially good to know for future people who could maybe build in some contingency to turn that into an advantage.
I looked into what was available in China, but I couldn’t find a lot of information. I was getting massive impressions and really low click through rates. I released an updated version using my Android Protector asset, which I created for that reason, to shut down the ads on unofficial versions and the impression counts went way down and click through ratios went to sane levels. For Chartboost, I was able to create a new App ID for a more direct comparison. Since Applovin automatically imports the app, it was a bit harder to see how well it worked. Especially with download ratio skewed so much. It was probably the worst launch I’ve ever had for a free product on Google Play, getting less than a dozen downloads the first day. But there were a thousand or so installs reported by Chartboost. Oddly, install counts from Chartboost are still inflated, but as long as the impressions and clickthroughs match realistically with what Google Play is telling me, I don’t care too much.
All my stuff has been pirated in China, I check using Flurry plugin within my apps.
It seems the real downloads and unique users is way off / can check China sales and pirating.
I been searching the net for solutions, there is one kit but its really out date.
http://www.shmoopi.net/downloads/shmoopi-anti-piracy/
Yeah when I look at Google Analytics (I’ve embedded code to track my game), I see a much higher amount of downloads of my game outside of Google Play or the Amazon App Store. Most of these were coming out of China. Seems I got a boost from the .apk file hitting all of these free download sites. Guess this speaks to the importance of being able to make income from your game even if it’s pirated. I use Admob for ads in it, so even the pirated versions should be showing the ads.
By the way I used this free plugin to do my analytics tracking.
Suppose I wanted to release a paid app without adds in it.
Could I use a strategy of still embedding Admob, etc, and silently turning it on when it detects the app has been pirated?
Or should I just forget about pirated copies all together.
Might have to be your approach. There is just no stopping the theft and redistribution of .apk files. It’s gonna happen. I guess the key would be how to detect that a game has not been obtained from an official source. I was looking into this aftually some time back. Unity - Scripting API: Application.genuine
“This is a boolean check which only has the value true or false. Application.Genuine works by checking whether the application has been modified since it was built from Unity, i.e. this would check if pirates have hacked and removed the App Store’s DRM protection. You can use this with an IF statement to be able to restrict users access, if this is the case.”
So in your case of a paid app, I am wondering if this if/else functionality used with this check would be as simple as enabling ad display if it returns true?
personally i don’t think there is a point in trying to fight, prevent, or even think about piracy. It’s a thing that happens. Most people who pirate software are too poor or young to have bought it anyway.
your effort is better spent on creating things, and maybe on some kind of validation system so you’re not wasting support time on pirates (serial number for forum signup or something).
plus, sometimes it provides free advertising and helps reach a new audience.