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Comment by mrcharles | Hacker News Reader

The piracy numbers don't surprise me; as a long time game developer, I've come to expect that kind of piracy turnout.

What surprises me is that gamecenter allows cracked apps to appear on leaderboards. Maybe I'm missing something, but since gamecenter requires an iTunes account, and iTunes knows what apps you've purchased, why would gamecenter allow data from iTunes accounts it knows don't own the game?

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It's really not a one-to-one. You are allowed to purchase an app and install it on multiple devices, say for your family members. There may be several AppleIDs that could legitimately play a game besides the one that purchased it.

Really? I was under the impression that you had to have the owning iTunes account to install an app on a device.

You do, But as me and my lady do, She uses my iTunes account on her phone to purchase apps, But I think she uses her own account for gamecenter.

Nope. Take a peek at Home Sharing.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3819

Interesting. Well, be that as it may, I'm still surprised that Apple doesn't track the owning iTunes account, and validate it. I'm cool with shared games, I think that functionality is great, but I should, as a dev, still be able to expect GameCenter to refuse data from pirated apps.

Seems like it would be trivial to log both the owning itunes account and the user itunes account for those systems.

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