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I hear argument #2 a lot but I'm not sure it's true. I'm more familiar with the world of commercial audio plugin development, where developers have been able to
by cageface 15y ago
I hear argument #2 a lot but I'm not sure it's true. I'm more familiar with the world of commercial audio plugin development, where developers have been able to directly correlate big drops in sales with the first appearance of cracked versions of their software.
- fmavituna 15y agoThat's interesting, I'm sure not all of them would buy the original product but also I'm sure there is some lost. In $1 product the difference might be much different than $1000 product. I'm also quite interested in hearing about hard data on the subject such as "We were selling 100 copies per month but after the pirated copy was out it decreased to 75" or "increased 150!". If anyone got them (or a link to such source) that would be great to hear.
- cageface 15y agoHere's a quote from a friend of mine that supports himself selling VST plugins: One of my softs stops working on certain days when cracked. On these days I have record sales. If I normally sell, say, an average of 3 copies a day, I will sell maybe 15 copies on those days where the crack stops to work. That's more than a 10% increase in sales. The effort put into that scheme was 2 days, which is less than 1% of the overall development work.
- fmavituna 15y agoThanks. That's really interesting, did s/he release an update to fix the crack issue or was it some kind of a server-side activation check that the changes caused software to disable itself?
- cageface 15y agoIt's a cat & mouse thing. He releases an update, they eventually crack it, then he starts again. He's smarter about it than most devs though. He's gotten good at tricking the crackers into thinking they've removed all the protection only to discover weeks later that they missed something.