How many people buy your games, how many people pirate them? Any experiences?
This depends on your position regarding piracy as a developer. Some developers see piracy as a “loss of sales” while others see it as an inevitable side effect of software development that simply comes with the territory.
But, yeah… some users here have been finding their content on piracy websites and peer-to-peer file sharing services. For the most part, you can’t really do anything about the piracy itself once you find it, but you can counter it by doing what you do best… continue developing and improving upon your content to make people want to buy it.
Most likely, if you aren’t making any sales, it’s probably because the product itself doesn’t stand out from the competition. The best way to solve this, is to educate yourself. Take a moment to actually download and play some of the other popular titles featured in the App Store and try to learn why they are so successful. Examine things like their user interfaces, art direction and control schemes. There is a lot out there to be gained from trying out your competitions games and then trying to come up with a way to top it.
It’ll definitely be tough at first and will involve a lot of trial and error, but I think this is the best method anyone can use to become a better, and more desirable, game designer.
I think that iPhone game piracy is a non-issue. (And yes, I’ve found my iPhone game on torrent sites.) The vast majority of users can’t use pirated games, and the barriers to getting into it are pretty high.
If you are really interested, then implement some network feature (highscores or similar) as well as this:
Simply send back a bool to your highscore tracking with the info if the game was played as a crack or not.
We did that for the ElectroCute update that went live last night, and going to see the stats for ourselves once people play.
Will report back once we get some data.
Thanks for the great link. Please do let us know what results you find.
By the way, how are implementing this in Unity? I don’t see how you can communicate between the Objective-C and Unity code, at least not in the current version. Or are you scanning the Info.plist in your Unity code?
How many people buy or pirate a game does definitely not depend on the position of the developer.
I’m not interested in the philosophical piracy discussion, I’ve read the same blah-blah a hundred times before. I’m not going to try and stop the pirates - I enjoy making games a lot more than trying to work out some protection scheme - I’m just interested in other people’s numbers to compare to my numbers.
Sorry if this was a bit harsh, Bones, but I simply don’t like being treated like an amateur.
i dunno… id feel pretty good about someone pirating my games, means its worthy enough to be pirated!
I’d be focusing on my client base and give them more reason for their purchase… im not sure what the limitation’s of iphone develepment is, but would it be possible to download extra content from a website, like extra games and levels n things, release them on a monthly basis. and require a username/password to access.
i have actually worked on a class/framework i can include into my apps that use similar checks with a few more tricky ones that dont require the app to even access the web. some of the tricks i use id like to think are almost impossible to figure out, thus remove from a binary. i should get a chance to use this in the next few weeks.
cough
My apologies for not meeting up to your expectations, your majesty. But your question was pretty light on specifics.
In the future, perhaps you might try saying “thank you” when someone bothers to acknowledge you, rather than randomly lashing out at them. You’ll get a lot more help that way.
I think my question was as short, simple and precise as it could have been.
I’d say thank you, had my post been: “I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m afraid of all the evil pirates - please help.”
But that was not what I wrote and so I think your suggestive reply was a bit off.
And now an attempt to get this topic back on track:
On this blog there’s some data that suggests that someone’s current buy/pirate ratio is about 2:1, whereas the pirates have an average usage of 7 runs per pirate in an 11 day period, which suggests that there’s quite a few pirates who’re actually playing his game a lot. How to Thwart iPhone IPA Crackers: Dear iPhoneCrackDetector
My game has only been out 2 days, so the data isn’t all that conclusive yet. Also the numbers are just a by-product of my attempt to provide personalized news to registered players. Thus I only know the number of sales and the number of unique users. But so far the ratio between buyers and pirates seems to be about 1:7, which I found a little surprising. I expect it to even out a bit once all the gotta-have-it-first-pirates have their copy and (fingers crossed) a small stream of genuinely interested people remains.
Anyone got any other experiences or links?
I read that blog, and was astounded at his claimed piracy rate. 1 out of 7 users? I know a ton of people with iPhones, and aside from some developers I know, I only know one regular-user-guy who jailbroke his phone. Data always beats anecdote, but even still, I find it hard to believe.
So yeah, more data please. drunknbass, do you see anything wrong with his detection method that might cause false positives?
I have a couple of theories why 8 users show up for each single sale…
A) There’s a popular pirate site somewhere that cracks the newest Apps as soon as they’re out. They have a following of a few thousand pirates who download whatever they can get.
B) Every buyer installs the game on 8 iPhones.
C) Some jailbroken iPhone generates a new random unique ID each time.
D) The game is selling unbelievably well, but Apple is trying to screw me…
But my guess would be A. :]