Our iOS game allready cracked! ? O_O

Unity Engine
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1

Hello,

we are the creators of Home Defender X for iphone. “nice” - ok!

now comes the frustrating part:
not even a day passed since the game is in the shop and we allready found a cracked version of the game in the net.

how can this happen so quick? is there a gap in unity that the game was cracked so quick?
is there no encryption feature to make the game more safer for crackers?
(it’s a *.ipa file) is it only playable on jailbreak iphones or does it work on every normal iphone?

sorry for all the questions, but when we saw it, we where shocked - and we still are!

2

As soon as 1 Unity game is cracked, any protection Unity would provide built in would be compromised, and crackable for all unity games in the future. Apple does most of the securing, however no protection is unbreakable.

You will never prevent illegal copies, but you can slightly deter or postpone them by adding your own form of crack protection.
But even then don’t waste your time trying to stop people who don’t want to be customers in the first place.

3

Maybe it sounds absolutely stupid but someone thought your game is good enough to crack it. This means that it is a good game. Hope that it will generate income for you

4

Sad… :frowning: One way of somewhat thwarting it is to use in app purchases “IAP” on your games. This is the direction I’m taking on my current game projects.

Basically, offer the game for free or a nominal fee, with only a handful of levels, then charge for the remainder of the game using IAP. You’ll also find that more users are inclined to think that .99 as an upfront cost is expensive. But when they use the IAP they feel less threatened about spending the .99. Human behavior is very interesting at times.

5

This is very depressing, it amazes me how fast and easy people can steal a game that the developer has worked on for so long… :frowning:

6

First, it is not a weakness of Unity that your game was ripped and distributed. It has become an almost single button push task to rip an IPA from an iOS device, unless it changed in the past few months, in which case, it really is a single button push.

Second, it will only work on jail broken iOS devices. The number of jail broken devices in China is estimated at around 30%, the number of estimated devices in the US is estimated, informally, at less than 2%. Google will turn up these statistics for you, take them with a grain of salt.

Thirdly, the people playing a pirated copy of your game are most likely never going to purchase your game, you can tie yourself in knots over ripping off software or you can just shrug and move on. You cannot stop it, but you can do certain things to mitigate the impact, e.g. move certain key components on-line, add new content only available to those who make an in-game purchase, etc. Make a free “try before you buy” version that isn’t too limited so that people can check it out first.

I have a jail broken device, and it frequently has ripped software installed on it. I want to check out software and I don’t want to drop $10 or $20 or even $50 in the case of the some of the remote desktop apps only to find out it is complete crap. There is an expression: “Not worth the drive space, let alone the money.” I have purchased, at a quick estimate, around $400 of software for the various iOS devices in the house, and probably another $80 on Android apps. I am not condoning or encouraging piracy.

If you have never ripped a company’s digital product (software application, video, music, game, book, etc) then you might have a reason to get all huffy about someone copying your game, otherwise, don’t sweat it, it’s not a big deal. How much of your game was made with ripped software? Every single install of Windows is legitimate? Every software package you used is paid for or Open Source or free?

How much have you lost on a sale you never would have made?

7

You are the minority of pirates though (technically you’re still a pirate), but of course I’m not stupid and I’m not attacking, I’m just observing. I think the phrase would be ‘honest pirate’ where you do it when you want to evaluate.

But you, sadly, are the minority. Most people will just pirate and not give a damn.

@op:

It’s much more important to get in the top 100 apps if you can, via promotion or whatever,than it is to try and combat piracy.

8

@hippo: I agree. Very much a minority but not all that honest. :wink: I lapse, it took me over a year before I paid for Numbers and Pages on the iPad after “evaluating it.” Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and a couple of others fell after only a few days because my girlfriend wanted to access the online content. Unity, Photoshop, and a variety of other tools are paid for but I run a cracked copy of Windows 7, even though I have an MSDN Universal subscription which gives me a bunch of licenses to install, because running a cracked Windows 7 is easier to deal with when switching out hardware than having to call Microsoft for the umpteenth time to reactivate the software.

Software I create gets pirated all the time. You would not believe the cheek of some people. Asking for support on software they never paid for. Even asking for a refund once (but only the once thank goodness.) Pirate away for all I care, I cannot stop it, it’s like punching at smoke. Make money by selling pirated software and somebody will be round your house to give you a good talking too. :slight_smile: Concentrate on maker a killer application or game, promote the crap out of it so that people who are your target audience will pay attention and buy it, and forget about those who are not your target audience. Otherwise, to reiterate, you will tie yourself in knots.

9

Well my ios game barnyard bounce was cracked even though it’s free. Some people are blind. Also, another dude over on toucharcade started moaning at me that he bought it just a few days before and now its free! and he wanted a refund. But its free.

People will just surprise you in delightful ways in the most idiotic manner possible.

10

asking for a refund for a free game, that was a good one hahahahaha

11

You can get some benefit out of the cracked copies by adding Game Center leaderboards to your game. Then the pirate users will at least bulk up your leaderboard stats so it looks like you have more paying customers, and it gives you some tracking of the piracy. For a while, I could tell someone was cracking my game HyperBowl within hours of each update showing up on the App Store, since I had more new leaderboard entries than paying customers. That really bugged me at first (imagine my disappointment at seeing a hundred new leaderboard entries and $5 for that day’s sales), but now I look forward to seeing each spike in Game Center users, and if the cracked copy is slow to show up I wonder if the guy is OK, maybe I should send him a card…

Also, consider ads. I was very slow to adopt ads because I personally don’t like to see them, but now I know I’ve been missing out - lately, half of my income from the App Store has been from iAds.

12

There are a number of tricks you can pull to spoil people’s fun in a game, but you have to be subtle and make sure that there won’t be a backlash from the people copying your game. Even if they don’t pay, they still have a voice that can be loud enough to dissuade legitimate customers from purchasing your game.

One of the things I have done (many decades ago) was to remove the required number of power-ups to complete something like, oh, I don’t remember the exact level number but lets call it the 17th level of the game. Most people who crack software won’t bother to play all the way through, and it will only affect those who do persevere. If they get that far in to your game, they aren’t trying it out, they are willfully getting something for nothing, might as well make it hard for them. Another trick was to reduce the amount of damage bullets did, suddenly you needed three shots to destroy the harder bad guys rather than two shots.

With the advent of in-game advertising you can switch on the ads if you detect an illegal copy, maybe around level 3 or so. Again, most crackers want to be quick about it and aren’t interested in playing the game, only cracking it and distributing it for the bragging rights of being “First!”

You can also filter all illegal players to an alternative leaderboard, or put them on the actual leaderboard, but with a special icon next to their name that shows they cheated/copied your game. The illegal copy doesn’t see the icon, all the legitimate players do and know that the other person illegally copied the game. I’ve done similar to this on a web game that if it detected you were cheating in the game, would start rolling lower numbers in the random generator and put the cheaters on a special leader board. Valve has done this with TF2 and their hats for highlight the exploiters to other players.

13

I have had someone demand their money back even though they didn’t pay for the game. She was barely literate, WROTE IN ALL CAPS, and was very demanding that she get her money back. I had support direct her to contact Big Fish Games where she bought the game from for a refund if she wasn’t satisfied. She insisted that she bought it through another portal that didn’t even handle that particular game, it was exclusive to Big Fish. She was going to sue, she was going to take me to court, blah blah blah, all for $9.95.

14

You should have given him the refund. Actually, you should have doubled his money back.

–Eric

15

Hmmm, I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if you are making a SHMUP? Most people who would buy SHMUP are hardcore players, and they usually play it on hard - and if you actually make the game HARDER for pirates you are actually REWARDING the people who didn’t pay. And I guarantee majority of the paying customers are the ones who actually plays the game over and over - they will be missing out on the “hardest level” basically they lose out on replayability.

Not a good idea to display pirate icon on public leaderboard. It basically tells people your game is “piratable” and it makes paying customer feel bitter for paying when they see other people get it for free, and worse of all, since there will ALWAYS be more pirates than paying customer, it will make them feel like the minority - that’s the funny thing about human psychology, we are social animal, we conform to the will of the majority, and if they see the majority are pirating the game without any consequence, they will feel be compel to do it too. That’s the power of the conformity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Nq0GYlFgE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRh5qy09nNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSsPfbup0ac

It is astonishing what people would do (or not do) to conform to the social pressure to be part of the so called “majority”.

Its actually a far better idea to EXCLUDE THEM from the leaderboard. Human being has the innate desire to be competitive and to show off - I have actually hear people buy the games they pirated simply because they want to be included in the online leaderboard.

16

Maybe she is a 5 year old kid? :smile:

Sounds like a 5 year old…

17

You misunderstand, the game can never be finished. There is not enough fire power to defeat the boss, or you run out of bullets and then go crazy searching the area for more ammunition, but you don’t find it out until very late in the game. You can report it as a bug, but only those people who pirate the game face the problem. 3D Studio had a bug where the model would degenerate over time the more you rotated it, it was very subtle. But people would go on the forums and post “My model does this!” and that was the tell, that you were running a cracked copy. Photoshop and Maya and Max have similar “issues.” It is quite funny. If you search for Unity web players (go to Wooglie for instance) and snag the package files, you can pull up each one in a hex editor, a high percentage of the games were produced with, wait for it… pirated copies of Unity3D Pro! In each Unity3D file is embedded identifiable information about the version and license that produced the Unity file. I am sure if I pulled up all of the web players posted on the forums quite a few would be made with illegal copies of Unity. I wonder how many assets in the asset store are sold with a pirated copy of Unity3D. It would be reasonably trivial to find out. I might write a script that identifies a package made with a pirated copy of Unity3D Pro and distribute it. People can run it on the assets that they have purchased to see if the asset was made “improperly.” Name and shame perhaps?

18

I know and understand the conformity effect well. I cannot say either way that it had an effect on the leader board. If it did, I don’t think it was measurable in any real sense. Pirates are lousy at the games they play apparently. :slight_smile:

19

I don’t understand. Why would the pirates try to sell Unity assets made with Unity Pro when there is Unity FREE that offers exactly the same function and reach out to a much wider audience in Unity Asset Store?

20

Justin, I think thats an awful idea, or awful execution of a potentially good idea.

The problem with that approach is the pirate doesn’t realise he or she is being penalised, so just thinks your game and your brand are shit and buggy, and ruined their fun.

If you are going to ruin the ride for them, you need to pop up a msg that late in the game and be honest with them: say “to continue, please purchase.” or something like that - be very direct… obviously this late they really want it. Or let them know full well why they are having problems.

But making it behave badly just frustrates pirates and they don’t know why.