New iPhone app piracy over week one.
smellslikedonkey.com
smellslikedonkey.com
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
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.)
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.
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.
But it's still business and lots people make a lot of money out of it.
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.
p.s. I love my Kindle.
2) I agree. This goes along with the booming micropayment systems.
I agree with you that putting value in the server is good for businesses, but the corollary is also true: it's bad for consumers.
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.
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?
Like OS X apps, iPhone apps are distributed as bundles (directories) containing all the required files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Bundle).
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.
Pirates have been reverse engineering and cracking Windows Mobile games by hand like this years.
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.
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.
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.