With 10 pirated copies for every 1 sale, iOS dev pulls game after just one week
pockettactics.com
pockettactics.com
1. There are no absolute sales figures here. It may be that the game sold dismally and a story about piracy might have gotten them developer a ton more PR than the game ever would've;
2. The issue in this particular case is not number of copies (pirated vs non-pirated) but the amount of hours spent from pirated vs non-pirated. Even that doesn't tell the whole story. Perhaps this game required a critical mass of users (some do)? If so, pirated users might ultimately be beneficial.
Also, when it comes to piracy there are a lot of people who download a lot of pirated content and then never look at it or they might try it once. Just getting the pirated content itself becomes a game;
3. How expensive is it to maintain a server on a per user or per user hour basis anyway? It seems quite likely a single machine can serve thousands if not tens of thousands of users as a conservative estimate; and
4. Are they shuttering the game or just overhauling the authentication model? If they plan on rereleasing it then the publicity of (1) becomes even more likely.
Like I said, I've seen a number of one-sided stories now where I've known something about the other side and as sympathetic as someone can make their case, believe me--generally speaking--there is a lot they don't tell you.
Also, don't discount the possibility of internal politics. It's a lot easier for a product lead to say "we had to pull this because of piracy" to his or her boss or board than it is to say "we made a game that no one bought".
I'm just saying.
if( iOS.version < 6 ) quit;
If they can tell who's pirated vs who hasn't (I assume they can), it seems like something is missing. Is it too cynical to suspect a marketing ploy to grab headlines?
The code given to Apple is not modified at any point before sent to a device. The code is also duplicated onto itunes, which is how you can so easily crack it.
The only way I know of to identify each and every purchaser is to use in-app-purchases.
It is all a bit odd I have to admit.
How does this actually solve the problem? Pirates are really unlikely to be colocated with the person who let them have an illegal copy of your app.
In my experience, piracy on iOS varies a lot with the region, too. The majority of my analytics come from China with only one(!) copy ever being sold there.
I'm not sure if all of those phones are jailbroken, or if they just use a single iTunes account to synchronise with hundreds of phones.
Also - any idea if the honest paying game payers are going to be compensated? In future they'll see paying for a game as i) paying for a weeks worth of play ii) pirating it for a weeks worth of play. You mustn't punish genuine users because of others behaviour...
I'm surprised that the company can't simply do a 'phone home' procedure when online services are tried though, verifying through App Store API's (if they exist) or by making their own things. Does anyone know how feasible that is ?
One solution might be to let the user tie their copy to an external authentication service (Facebook, Google, some other OpenID provider). If you wanted to minimize user hassle, you could only require this step if the user wants to move the game to another device (and of course you could limit the number of devices allowed at any one time, similar to Apple's authorize/deauthorize for devices). An inconvenience, sure, but not as annoying as not being able to move the app at all.
Note that I'm not saying that this is THE solution, just the one that comes to mind immediately.
Does anyone see a problem with it?
Fighting piracy always comes with an effort/reward calculation like that.
If it's an online game, the license check is performed on the server side and no amount of clever client cracking won't get around that. When you buy a license, the licensing server associates some sort of ID with your installation, the same ID that must be presented to the server for an online play. No valid license -> no valid ID -> no online play. That's how all massive online games with free clients work. Easy-peasy. The question here is what can be used as an ID in case of iOS games, but, again, this is a solvable problem.
Moreover, the same scheme applies to the standalone software, except there's an extra step involved with strengthening the executable against any modifications. What Photoshop did is the lamest thing possible (and I think it's a valid theory that they did it on purpose to facilitate the piracy rather than to curtail it). A simple option is to sprinkle 100s of conditionals around the code (with a simple pre-processing script if need be), do not issue any sort of messages, but instead just make the code corrupt heap, stack and do other things that would cause the program to go down after a while. Then simply sign the executable. This is very effective. For every complain in the support forums that the program crashed (and a crash dump that shows the absence of a valid file signature), there's a automatic reply that it's a cracked copy, you get what you paid for.
It's the same principle, taking a business model that might have worked in the past and forcing that square peg in to the round hole.
They have a good game, that engaged people, even at a price point of zero that seldom happens. Hopefully they will be able to think of a way of making money to sustain it.
Hopefully not the whole freemium thing, as a gamer I hate that.
It's sad how these kids don't realize they are killing the platform they are trying to play on.
I agree that the business model of the game devs is "wrong" because they were trying to charge one-time fees for lifetime server support. What if there had been no pirates, but paying players had played for 10 months instead? Would that have caused the same server issues? But that is a calculation that seems to work okay-ish with better DRM (or at least it worked great for Diablo 3 in the first weeks - I stopped tracking it after that).
What is more interesting here though is that (AFAIK) the only way to run pirated iOS games is to jailbreak your phone/tablet. I'm going to assume that waaay less than 90% of iOS users jailbreak their phone.
So this either means that people who are interested in iOS games are far more likely to jailbreak that people who aren't gamers (not an unreasonable hypothesis but 90% still seems high).
Or there's something about this particular game that makes it especially appealing to jailbreakers?
In other words , when you run the game you get a selection of servers to play on. If you want to play on the official servers you need an account from the developer (which you get when you buy it) but if you are a pirate user you get to run on any of the unofficial servers only. Of course paying customers will be able to use either official or unofficial servers.
The only way I know is through in app purchases.
When using in app purchases you will get a receipt from apple that is signed with their certificate that you can process and send to your own servers to limit pirates from accessing the servers.
Unfortunately it's very hard to get stats to show the number of server hours used by pirates vs. non-pirates.
"A multiplayer game like Battle Dungeon requires servers to host matches – servers that Hunted Cow has to pay to maintain. ”If they were all legitimate sales, it would have given us the resources to work on it further, however the way it was going it just wasn’t viable.”"
That seemed like a reasonable explanation to me. Since I assume you too read the submission before commenting, I'm interested what part of the above explanation you disagree with.
Removing your app (that presumably you invested resources into developing) for something trivial seems crazy.
If any of the above are true, they are paying for people to steal from him. On top of that, there's nothing worse than knowing you spent a lot of time building something to have people steal it from you because they're too cheap to drop $1, $5, $10 despite how much time or return it gives them.
One of my company's most popular (Android) apps has a 50% piracy rate and it irritates me to no end.
If you think back to the era of amigas and floppy disks it was probably about the same.
Everyone had bags stuffed with 3.5" floppies.
So one way of combating piracy would be to release updates weekly and disable access for the old version after another week. Yes, the pirates would be able to keep up, but updating apps is a much bigger hassle for pirates than for those who purchased the app.
I assume they were naive in thinking that piracy wouldn't happen.
Changing the business model may be a possibility, charging for 'in game' goods.
I don't think they were naive, but they probably didn't expect the piracy level to be quite as high as it would be. Doing server-side blocking for pirated stuff is reasonably difficult, as successfully detecting who's pirated and who's not can occasionally go wrong and burn the paying customers.
I don't think they have a problem with that...
If a free app is a demo and IAP is a one-time upgrade to the full version, then it's reasonable and perfectly acceptable. This is, arguably, what the IAP were actually designed for - a nextgen support for try-then-buy software.
The pushback is typically aimed at tacky milking practices - "a satchel of coins for $5.99, a pot of gold for $15.99, etc". You either release a limited, but self-contained playable demo, or a fully functional game. Anything that falls into a stretch between these two feels like a sleazy bait-n-switch kind of deal, hence the pushback.
I personally think companies releasing apps now should be bold enough to stake it and go "it's $10". Square Enix are, it seems to be working for them, sometimes.
If the game is self-contained, sure, I see your point, but even there I'd make an exception for "major version"-level changes -- you should let your existing customers have a price break if possible, but maybe not give it to them for free.
I have paid for the app and for each expansion, as I love the game. Still a low fixed-fee, as opposed to the MMO "buy virtual crap" model that seems to give IAP a bad name.
Perhaps there's a middle ground? More like "pay to attend events/quests/goals where the MMO part is accentuated (think virtual concert), but "most other stuff is free"? Something that gets those who like the game more to pay into it gladly while still leaving something on the table to get the casual person interested.
Or rather you're so difficult to sell too that it's not worth the effort. Perhaps there are a load of people out there who will pay for the things you won't, even if they're relatively small in number they're potentially much more lucrative?
Giving the client software away for free and charging for access to official servers has been done for years successfully by Eve online and other games.
Looking at the top grossing games on the Oz App Store, I wonder if the trick is not simply "don't be a small player": http://i.imgur.com/9S1yx.png?1
Could a small team handle the traffic and meintenance needed for a freemium game?
If it runs server side you can redirect those packets (often as simple as changing HOSTS file) to a server that you control which can be set to always say "yes, you are legit!"
This is why a lot of games are now removing LAN play, because if you can run the pirated game on a LAN you can use a VPN to turn it into an internet game etc.
This is security 101 people. Don't trust what the client says.
This is why DRM is fundamentally broken for singleplayer games (or music , or movies) in that you have to trust the client.
For mulitplayer games that require a server, you only allow them to connect and do the multiplayer bit if they have paid. Simples.
Your choice is either to do as these guys did and run all the servers themselves in which case you need to factor the lifetime cost of running the servers into the purchase price or charge subscriptions.
If you ever take the game servers offline the game then becomes unplayable and will preclude modded servers (which were fun in games like CS) and LAN play. There's till a risk that if your game is popular enough someone will reimplement the server.
So the other way to do it is to allow third party servers or build the game to work on a type P2P system (I think a lot of xbox games still work this way). At that point you are basically back to the original problem.
Am I missing something?
If the game is fundamentally built in such a way that the gameplay requires everyone to be on one set of servers (e.g WoW) then you can prevent piracy by strictly controlling access to those servers.
For example if you wanted to pirate WoW you would have to reverse engineer the game to the extent where you could implement your own WoW server from scratch which would be a huge amount of work and you would have a situation where pirates would only be able to play with other pirates.
If on the other hand the server is used only to verify authenticity then you simply have to re-implement the authenticity part (easy because you only need to genereate a 'yes' response). You also have to make the client redirect some of the traffic to the fake server (easy to do).
Many games with centralised authenticity servers still run on a fairly P2P system for running the multiplayer itself (i.e the game is actually hosted by one the players). This means that you already have the server software built into the client so that part doesn't need reimplementation.
Some hacks might work if they don't want to go down this route like issuing an update that contacts the server for a unique ID on first run and treating those that don't update quickly as suspicious - request them to email the iTunes receipt or something.
How quickly is regarded as suspicious could be worked out by looking for when there is a divergence between installs (and unique ID requests) and the daily update totals the app store provides. Duplicated IDs should be easy to detect it they access the service later.
According to these numbers, the few seem to outnumber the many 9-to-1. As a software developer and someone who doesn't mind paying for good games, the state of affairs saddens me a great deal, but it would be hypocritical to blame this on the fringe "one-per-centers".
Piracy at least brings you publicity. Even if you would somehow be able to ban all piracy, in the best case you still would only have that one sale out of 10.
Pulling the game from the store was a pretty stupid move. If I really wanted to play that game now I have no other choice but to - you guessed it - pirate it.
If even 10% of the pirates end up paying, that's a 100% increase in sales, so the implications of that assumption are not small.