iPhone piracy - the cold hard figures: 96% illegal downloads
Posted by iPhoneWorld.ca Reader on July 27th, 2009 at 11:27am Comments
The developer of The Little Tank That Could iPhone game writes:
After the first release of my iPhone game ‘the little tank that could’, I was very excited. I thought the game was fun to play, and could possibly do very well on the appstore. That turned out not to be the case. For the first 5 days on the store, it sold 20, 10, 5, 2 and 8 copies. A total of 45 copies sold. That was disheartening.
To my astonishment, I found out that ‘the little tank that could’, which sold a total of 45 copies in 5 days, actually had 1114 different players contacting the leader board server.
There is a full writeup on this here.
No doubt the same situation is affecting other developers as well and this once again brings up the question of whether those that pirate games and other apps would have bought them in the first place.
But in this case the stats are just amazing: 45 sold copies and 1114 players that used the scoreboard (and potentially not everyone that plays the game would have used it) amount to at least 96% illegal downloads.
In a situation like this one Apple has to rethink its copy protection measures due to widespread availability of tools like Crackulous that appear to break the protection with each and virtually 0 knowledge on the part of the user. Furthermore, Apple should take proactive measures to target and shut down sites that offer pirated versions of apps to download.
And an even better solution for Apple would to allow developers to use their own APIs for custom protection schemes, although hell will probably freeze over before this will happen.
Related posts:
- iPhone App Downloads Continue to Rise: 1.5 billion downloads in 1 year
- The Cost of iPhone App Piracy
- Kali Anti-Piracy: copy protection for iPhone AppStore apps
- iPhone sales figures in Germany worse than expected
- Interview with the developer of The Little Tank That Could game about iPhone apps piracy and more
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