Piracy Cripples iOS Game in Less than a Week

Go find the Apple API that let's them know if this device belongs to a person who really bought the app. To my knowledge (not saying that is super-impressive by any stretch!), it doesn't exist.

It's the same reason you basically have to "repurchase" IAPs when you get a new device. There is no way for the developer to track that information and get you your rightful bits.

This has been going on long enough that I don't think Apple is going to do anything about it, either. I think they'd rather developers take the hit than have their customers get ugly interactions, even if they deserve it for pirating the games.

That was my thought too. Nonetheless, that's a technical misfeature (they assumed the walled garden provided all the authentication they needed, and it doesn't), and technical misfeatures happen all the time. Now they have to decide whether to implement that feature or not, and that's a business decision: they know what the (legitimate) sales numbers are already. If those aren't enough to justify the cost, then it's simply not worth it and they should just shut it down.

Or, more cynically, they know they can get a bunch of press (and thus, more sales) by "shutting down" the game temporarily while they implement the authentication layer.

I didn't look at how they make users pay but if it's not in app purchase they do not have a way to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate users therefore they must accept all server requests or none.

It would be hard to do with a paid download since AFAIK Apple does not include some sort of receipt on an app purchase. What I would have done was implement the game as free to download with an unlock IAP. With an IAP Apple returns a receipt to the client that is tied to the users account. The game server could then verify the receipt with Apple on each client connect.

This would also give the developers the ability to track the receipts and know if it had been hacked and shared. If the same receipt is being used to connect 100s of times simultaneously then it's time to ban a user. So while the IAP method isn't perfect, it would make it a lot harder for casual piracy to succeed.

My interpretation was that they had a budget of $x to run their servers with from y paying customers. $x in no way could provide the services that y+z needed (z being the number of pirates) regardless of infrastructure or efficiency of code. Instead they decided to cut losses and refund without finding a way to block z or monetize it.

They would have had the same problem if this were a free-to-play game.

Actually, they would have had a smaller server load (though it would have still overwhelmed them) because I'm sure a percentage of these people are playing it merely because it was pirated -- like kleptomaniacs, these people want to play the game mostly because they aren't supposed to be allowed to. Some people just want to break laws to show they can, as a latent rebellious streak.

I completely agree! What an odd title to the article, and then the company itself goes ahead and basically says, "Yeah, since now there are actually people using the game, we found out that it would be too much work to fix the serious problems that were there in the first place."

If they were willing to work on their product further this would have been a good event for them as a wakeup call in order to know what to expect later when the load gets heavier.

There is harm and foul here.

Apparently, they developed iteratively and failed to do "premature optimization." Fact is, hosting servers costs money, and developing optimized software costs money and time. The pirated copies are costing them money without giving them anything in return. On top of that, a lot of these people might have paid for the game if they had not been able to get it free.

As a game dev you are going to have an awful lot of things on your mind that are more important than optimizing a system that currently works. This is business reality. Obviously, this could have been an "excuse" to shutter a poorly-constructed game, but I totally believe that the load from copies freely obtained (against the developers' wishes) made their product untenable. All their blood, sweat, and tears, wasted.

I feel deeply about software piracy.

Piracy disrespects the software developers. The developers worked hard to produce something and you tell them that there code is worth $0.00. I'm extremely offended that people pirate code.

The key is that they asked for money and you told them no. It's one thing for someone to offer their software for free, it's another thing for someone to say, "I need money to develop this," and you tell them "No, your software isn't worth that." Maybe you didn't mean that. It's like slapping someone in the face and telling them that you really didn't mean it that way.

I'm absolutely shocked that comments in this thread insist that it's the responsibility of the developers to either throw up an authentication wall (think about the conversion losses!) or just handle thousands of people using their software for free. That's precious development time that they've spent on premature optimization when they could have built better features for paying customers.

I'll wager that 95% of the developers commenting here actually get paid for their code in some way, shape, or fashion. Why wouldn't you want to pay for someone else's code? Why do you have a kneejerk reaction when other people don't want to pay to use others' code?

I go out of my way to support free code if there's a donate button. Nearly every time I see a donate button I click it. I used Readability before their donations fell apart. I have a gittip account. I respect developers and the time it takes to create code, so I pay the price.

I assume the people reading this are like me. You also donate to open source projects and buy the paid version when possible, once you've tried the game. However, the rank and file of people who are pirating software probably do not.

Even though copying code is cheap, piracy takes a toll on the company: - It often takes away potential sales. - Pirated copies are often sub-par and can tarnish your brand. Some developers might not realize how important brand is, but just consider how many millions of dollars are spent to build brand for these companies. - In this case, pirating imposed an unbearable load on servers. They had to shutter the game.

I am all about open source and donate whenever possible. I totally understand that, for example, patents are just ridiculously overplayed in today's world. However, software piracy offends me deeply. I think it ought to offend other developers as well, but you are free to hold whatever opinion you like.

Not sure if it's "couldn't" or just didn't want to, if they really made little money on the game.

But, there seems like there's more to this story. I haven't played the game... but having a popular free-to-download game and making money on consumables is the new App Store model.

So seems if it was a very popular pirated game, they could easily make money promoting it to the broad free-to-download audience and make money on in app purchases. I'm guessing the game will come back retuned as a free-to-play game. (looks like it already had IAP, not sure how effective it was).

If they were all paying customers they could probably afford to move more coders on to the project and help with scaling issues.

They mentioned that the increase happened after a pirated .ipa was released; plus I imagine that they could look at their sales numbers, and then look at the number of people logging in, and realize that something was amiss.

Actually in this day and age scaling you code (to a moderate level) is maybe not the hardest part, I think the hardest part is to have the ressources to pay for hosting, bandwidth, cpu and ram. Thus if your model was not to provide a free app and have indirect incomes, in this case having non paid users is a major problem. But I think they should have thought about this problem before launching their app and implement anti-piracy measures.

That seems like a poor use of time compared to making the service scale, which is something you'd probably need to do anyway if you expect to get more legitimate users. And it you don't expect to get more legitimate users then maybe ongoing development really doesn't make any sense.

42% more than they received.

If only the App Store / iOS has a way to verify receipts that are installed with the app... http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networ...

Yeah, if it is an online-only server based game it should be much easier to prevent piracy.

Isn't an online authentication mechanism what got Mojang and EA sued by a patent troll? http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Uniloc-Patent-Troll-Mojang-EA,ne...

I am in favor of this line of thinking, there's a lesson to take out of this about finding a way to make sure you get paid.

Ah yes, and this is the part where common sense runs head first into Apple's walled garden.

This is how almost every multiplayer game does it to great success - tie your copy of the game into an account that the game developer can verify (possibly via a third party, like Steam). This makes it such that it's pretty much impossible for a pirated copy to hit your server.

Except, Apple does not allow you to take payments outside their channels for services provided in an App Store app. You don't have any personally identifiable information as the developer - nothing that can indicate if the user is a legitimate, paying user.

Administering IAPs and subscriptions is a huge pain due to the opaqueness of Apple's APIs. When customer service gets a complaint, like, say "I subscribed to your shit but I don't have premium access!" you cannot do any verification whatsoever, since you don't know their Apple ID, and their Apple ID was never visible during the transaction, so there's no way for you as the third party to back-trace anything.

I think this is the only way to go if you have significant server expenses necessary to support the game. Still it sounds like Apple doesn't let you know who legitimately bought the app, and they also prohibit in-app purchases that don't go through their system. So I'm wondering how people actually deal with this?

Afaik there is no way to verify purchases (since Apple never sends you a receipt for it).

It's trivial to verify in-app purchase receipts server-side, however. And that could be used to allow (or not) access to the multiplayer bits.