I think it also affects legitimate gamedev studios. But yeah, I couldn't care less for the signees on this letter. Good riddance, boys; if your product can only run on ads because people won't pay for it, you know you have a shitty product. We need higher quality games in the market, not higher quantity of your chaff.
If anyone ever wonders why premium games on mobile died out, there's your answer.
But to give a TL;DR for those who don't click through: Piracy on Android in the 2010's was especially rampant, due to the nature of how you APKs are packaged and distributed (and how hard Google makes to add DRM). 70% piracy rates were common on Android compared to 30% on IOS, and it wasn't unusual to hear of 90+% in some games, to the point where a few games went f2p simply because they could not get users to pay a single dollar for their game.
in a particular instance, the hit game Monument Valley, a 2014 game that had 26m downloads on IOS alone in 2016, was reporting 95% piracy rates on Android. It is (or was, back in 2018) $3 on IOS, and now f2p on Android for that reason.
if you want a frame of reference for how absurd this is (not that you should to understand how 19/20 of your "customers" aren't buying your game): PC piracy has stayed around 33-40% throughout the decades. I cannnot blame developers for switching or abandoning the platform given those piracy rates. It would legitimately be better to offer a demo on Android (a properly isolated demo, not "part of the full game" demo) and point them to console/PC than it would to spend resources porting to Android.\
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Gabe Newell is oft-quoted saying "Piracy is a service problem". Well, this shows that services can simply get around this by turning the pirated content into a thin client and store all the value on the server. It simply took until "always online" was no longer a lofty assumption to perform.
Nobody has abandoned PC. PC games are still around despite piracy. And for some, they are still around because of piracy. I understand your point, but I still don't buy that ads and DRM is the solution here. How come GOG even exists, according to your theory? The only games I buy are DRM-free and they're on GOG.
Of course not. Let me know when PC market gets 70+% piracy. Which mind you does happen in some regions and has caused indies some trouble.
Even then, the PC market resorts to DRM for this exact reason, so that cited 40% is still too much for some larger studios. But the difference between almost half your sales potentially going away, and a scale where 19 out of every 20 players never paid for your game is orders of magnitudes.
>How come GOG even exists, according to your theory?
Because GOG doesn't have 90% market share, and because AAA studios do in fact bypass GOG for DRM issues (until very recent times IIRC where GOG has made exceptions. Have to look that up again).
And to bring it all around: think about how Unity would affect this under it's original "plan". They can't track piracy so you will get dinged on 200k sales, even if 190k never purchased your game. At 90% piracy you'd need 2M "sales" and you'd be charged 400k dollars in runtime fees despite say, making 600k on a $3 app.
Google/Apple comes in and takes 180k and you're left 20k on your "successful" premium indie mobile game. Because piracy cost you $300k instead of maybe potentially being "free advertising" like how some people try to frame it.it was already bad but Unity showed how much worse it could be.
Those companies would rebuild their games from scratch before they truly disappearing. They have literal billions of dollars each, and they will long outlive Unity at this rate.
