It's refreshing to see someone disagreeing with the notion that piracy is universally good for a game/program etc. because it does convert into some sales.
And with hard stats too.
I wouldn't call it proof either way but it is a nice counter point to previous posts I've seen.
Im not surprised to be honest; if the game can be completed in a reasonably short amount of time I guess there is no real reason for the pirate to pay. He/She is not paying for more game but for what they just completed - I dont think many people put much monetary value on their past :D
I like the data as well but I'm not so sure it disproves anything. As he said in his blog the game is currently climbing the charts which would be consistent for a game worth playing that wasn't released with a lot of pre-release hype. It's only one week's worth of data so far but definitely worth keeping track of.
Also if the pirate types are still the same as in my Atari ST / Amiga days then these people really aren't interested in buying your software anyway. They generally just collect and hoard all the software without using much of it.
It would be very interesting if he's able to find out from his data how long a pirated version is played as compared to a bought one. (And also the age of the users but that data's probably way out of reach.)
> The game is however slowly rising up the charts (e.g. top 100 apps in Japan)
I wonder if any of these can be due to a buzz generated by people playing game for free?
I modern harsh world you have to give away a lot to actually sell anything. You can't sell a newspaper without DVD. You can't sell DLC without giving free client to anyone who wants it. You can't sell a game without giving cash to advertisers or free pleasure to pirates. You choose what you prefer but pirates will get what they want anyway. Because they can.
Pirates will not get what they want, and neither will many legitimate customers, once publishers figure out the lesson of piracy: pirating the client is easy, pirating the server is hard, divide value accordingly and retool your business model to suit.
I just opened my Kindle today and am having a "Wow, I'm living in the future" experience, so let's roll with what living in the future looks like for gamers:
1) The bestselling American PC game (dominating the industry, with 4 of the top 20 slots) will be a $60 paperweight without a $15 pay-per-month account, verified server-side.
2) There will be an explosion of what is euphemistically called free-to-play games, which are actually free-to-trial and then turn on aggressive monetization within minutes of starting. All content is locked down on the servers. Anything you buy can vanish at a whim. There is generally no maximum price for the game -- they are designed to extract more and more money from you the more you value the game.
1) I suggest that actually the largest-grossing games will be things that run inside of some sort of trusted computing-y system. Right now, the 360 and PS3 fill that role, especially the 360, with its really-pretty-good internal verification systems. I suppose Steam could turn into a setup like that as well. I note MS also pushes the server-side hard, like you suggest, and I agree this has added significant value to their games,making offline play less appealing.
2) Agreed completely, this is happening now, a-la D&D Online. As companies figure out how to forecast revenues from such things, we'll be seeing a lot of this. And, frankly, I think a lot of us won't mind. I kind of like pay-as-you go, personally. It lets me choose how much to spend on the game.
They touched on it in their post, but I'd recommend making the app free and then charging $3.99 to unlock its full features.
Advantages:
- Their app will be a lot tougher to crack. It won't be an automatic process like it most likely is now. Last I checked, all it took to crack an app was breaking the encryption and adding a "SignerIdentity" key to the Info.plist.
- They take away the "try before buy" excuse some pirates use as justification.
- They get their product into more people's hands => get more people talking about it.
Not really, you would have to just modify the StoreKit library to act like a sandbox account all the time, or with the specific app, therefore all in-app purchases would be marked as successful. With server side in-app purchases, you would have to circumvented receipt verification, but there's probably a way for that.
I always thought the app was decrypted in memory and then run, and cracked versions were dumped from memory and written to disk. So once loaded, the app binary looks the same to both a cracked app and a legit app. How can you tell the difference?
Unfortunately, that method of detecting piracy doesn't work anymore. I (and a few others that I work with on an app) were hoping to be able to check Info.plist to detect if an app is pirated or not (for analytics; the app is open source anyway). All reports show it as legit now, even though the app has been cracked and in the wild for a bit by now.
Of course, if you actually started using this method to put up a nag screen, the pirates would just remove the integrity check too. I would imagine the only reason it's even possible is because the game works fine and the pirates didn't notice the flag.
I'm not sure this is true, or if it is true, it might not be true in the way the original guy who wrote the story mentioned. He said his app was up about 40 minutes after launch on a pirate site. I get the impression that what you download from Cydia rewrites the system calls, once for all, and does not rewrite each app internally. These apps are distributed binary, yes? So you're going to need a cracker with a disassembler, iphone dev kit and some time to pull out the internal checks. This opposed to doing it once for all on the iphone OS side. I'm betting that's how it's done, and if that's how it's done, then adding those checks will have some impact.
The info.plist file is a plain xml of key/value pairs of properties that tell the OS how to handle the app, which kind of files can be opened with it etc.
AFAIK, the application that kids use to crack iPhone apps adds a key/value pair to the info.plist which is needed to load the app on a jailbroken device. So, you just need to check for its presence. If the key is there, the app has been cracked.
I understand how it works, but my point is that if you use this check to shutdown the app or constantly nag the pirates, they will simply crack the game to remove the check. The only reason this guy was able to gather statistics was because he allowed pirated versions to continue to function normally.
Pirates have been reverse engineering and cracking Windows Mobile games by hand like this years.
I think you're right about it being a mostly automated process right now -- but don't think making them doing a little work will scare away the pirates. I bet there are lots of kids in the iPhone warez scene looking for a challenge.
I did some research into mobile app piracy 3 or 4 years ago and found a thriving scene for cracking WinMo, Palm, and J2ME apps and games. And these were not automated cracks, someone sat there with a debugger and reverse engineered the registration keys.
I wonder if the developer did anything to ask users to buy the legitimate version. I have an app in the App Store and I limit users to a certain number of photo uploads before giving them a notification to buy it. I've had about a 20% piracy rate. 0.85% of the total (4% of pirates) bought the app after pirating and 0.63% bought it before seeing the message.
What's unfortunate is that this pushes Apple to work harder to lock us out of our devices, since it all depends on jailbreak-ability.
Example: I want to be able to redirect calls to my existing number to an audio message that I've got a Google Voice number now. I can only do that by jailbreaking and hacking about.
Note that you will be charged as if your phone is dialing the GV number. When I was in the UK and had forwarding set up, I was charged the $1.79/min as people left me voicemails as if my phone was dialing the GV number.
Once nice thing about Android is that you have to give applications permission to spy on you. Reading the useful "unique IDs" (phone number & IMEI) requires the "read phone state" permission. (That is why random apps that don't deal with your phone need that permission. And is why I don't install them unless I can see the source code.)
Anyway, I would not pay for an app that collects my personal uniquely-identifiable information and sends it to an untrusted third party. The pirates have the right idea here.
The pirates have the right idea? Seriously?
If you do not agree with a piece of someone else's work, don't buy it, fine. But disagreement does not give you the right to steal it.
That only works if you can check what the other person's work is like. When the app is distributed as a binary on a locked system that can only run one app at once you have don't know whether it's phoning home or what it's sending. If it's talking over wifi you can sniff on your lan but if the data is encrypted, good luck.
And with hard stats too.
I wouldn't call it proof either way but it is a nice counter point to previous posts I've seen.
Im not surprised to be honest; if the game can be completed in a reasonably short amount of time I guess there is no real reason for the pirate to pay. He/She is not paying for more game but for what they just completed - I dont think many people put much monetary value on their past :D