You see a 12 year old reviewing your app on youtube, ‘its a 99c app… but i got it for free because i jailbroke it’
Punk.
If he’s got an ipod or iphone, he can damn well pay for apps because I could tell he wasn’t spending his money on anti-pimple cream.
Sadly, piracy is a reality that every gamemaker has to model around :?
But not everyone is such no-brainer, don’t worry 
Its one thing to pirate, but to openly admit it on youtube is a level of stupidity I don’t think i’ve encountered before.
Sure, he’s called the bluff though, who’s going to do anything about a $1 app 
So here’s the question that you all want to know the answer to…
If you can detect the app is missing its DRM, will apple detect that you’ve embedded a meatspin, goatse, tubgirl or lemonparty into the app?
(If you don’t know what any of those proper nouns are, don’t ask.)
Isn’t there some sort of piracy reporting to Apple ?
I guess that as it’s possible to detect if an app is hacked or not, this would be easy to send an alert to Apple.
Imbedding something along those lines I could see you getting sued, and losing.
Imbedding something which just disables the app, would be the more appropriate choice.
Isn’t this what can lead to sueing ?
Probably as well, if you dig into Apple’s TOS and whatnot, but I was just trying say that redirecting the user to some terrible website, or displaying offensive content shouldn’t be the direction you should be going towards.
Heheh, would be fun if was put some weird game restriction …
Like 10% HP, 10% ammo, or inverted controls ?
:lol:
Please don’t embed something like that in your app, you could inadvertently affect all of us by doing that.
When the Hot Coffee scandal hit Rockstar the whole game industry was affected. Small studios all over the world suddenly found it impossible to be able to afford the business insurance they require to be able to get contracts from publishers because insurance companies suddenly became very concerned about what those studios might embed in their games that would cost them millions of dollars.
If you stick something like meatspin in your app, at a minimum Apple’s going to take it out on every app you ever submit again, but potentially they could change their already slow review system to do ridiculous testing and slow everything down for all of us even worse!
The best thing to do is if you detected DRM is missing, revert it to the Lite version or start showing ads. It’s the best defense - you still making money and pirates will suck it up.
If you can get them to report their position, why not call in an airstrike? A successful air strike is 100% guaranteed to prevent future piracy from that individual.
Dead people wont give you any eCPM…
Well, at least you got some advertising out of it. Saved you the trouble of issuing a promo code…
Lol… I think replacing all the in-game audio with pirate sounds would be a winner
Or just fire off a blood curdling scream at full volume periodically.
I think the coolest piracy-detection feature would be to have the app register with a server, preferably with the GPS info. (another request for the iPhone Enhancement Pack?) Then you could augment the usual download/upgrade/geography stats with pirated/geography stats (another slice on the AppViz pie chart).
But I see from another thread that Apple approval might require a prompt for the upload like, “would you like to register this pirated copy?”
That in itself would be hilarious
And how well would this “coolest” detection work with legal copies on second and 3rd device of the same account and user.
Ultimately if you make a good enough game, then piracy doesn’t matte - as much. It’s an easy target to blame, but the reality is that most games are just pretty bad and wouldn’t sell anyway.
Build it and they will come.