6 ms·

With 10 pirated copies for every 1 sale, iOS dev pulls game after just one week

41 points by crm114 14y ago

krautsourced 14y ago
Was there no registration or anything to join the servers? If they have a browser game business, there must have been some sort of account management in place already? Are they going to re-release with a different user scheme, or are they reimbursing customers now? In any case, it's pretty shitty for them. Tbh I wasn't even aware that piracy was such a big issue in iOS. Good to know.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Precisely. Surely you can give each purchaser a unique code (hash of transaction number?) to connect to the server with, and only allow one connection per code at a time. (I don't do iOS dev, but I assume this is trivial.) 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?
  - hmottestad 14y ago
    I don't think it's trivial. 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.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Well it would be a server side check. But even a rudimentary IP address check would be fine to ensure one connection at a time. It is all a bit odd I have to admit.
    - yebyen 14y ago
      Aside from barring users who are legitimately sharing a connection (and not even pirating your app)... 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.
  - relix 14y ago
    They don't necessarily know who has pirated and who hasn't. They might just see that there are e.g. 100K people registered on their servers, and they only had 10K sales.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  The problem is that it is hard (impossible) to tell from within an iOS app if it has been purchased legitimately. If you want to give users the convenience to buy the app for $.99 and then start playing, then I don't think you have a chance to add any meaningful validation. I wonder how it would've worked with subscription IAPs. I would guess that they are a big psychological problem to potential legit players. This would have been a great chance to find out. 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.
  - tomeric 14y ago
    I have seen a lot of small shops in Thailand that feature iMac's with iTunes accounts that are loaded with apps. People go there, pick out the apps they want, leave their phone there for an hour or so and then pick it up again for a very low fee. 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.
    - cynix 14y ago
      I believe the restriction is that each iTunes account can be synced to 10 devices, and each device can sync with 5 iTunes accounts. So it's very likely that those shops are jailbreaking the phones and installing pirated apps.
raverbashing 14y ago
Well, if you know the pirated copies from the licensed ones you can try to block in the server. 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.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  There's starting to be a pushback against developers releasing games for free and monetising through IAP if appears 'excessive', and required for the game. I've seen more than a few comments levied about it, essentially there's a reasonably vocal group who don't want to pay more than 79p for games, and don't want IAP to be necessary for their enjoyment. 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.
  - hamai 14y ago
    >burn the paying customers. I don't think they have a problem with that...
    - nicholassmith 14y ago
      I imagine if they've pulled the app they'll probably have to go through a refund procedure, but I'm not 100% on that as it's a pretty rare and odd situation.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    > There's starting to be a pushback against developers releasing games for free and monetising through IAP 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.
stuaxo 14y ago
I seem to remember an article before saying this is about the normal ratio. If you think back to the era of amigas and floppy disks it was probably about the same.
- meaty 14y ago
  I doubt that was even the case, unless you wrote disk copying software. X-Copy Pro was the only bit of software I ever purchased :) Everyone had bags stuffed with 3.5" floppies.
- yuchi 14y ago
  I remember a photocopied version of Another World anti-piracy booklet from when I was 6. I bought the iOS version, just to "give back".
TheAnimus 14y ago
It is funny, I without hesitation felt sorry for the devs. But then I recalled sighing at the attitudes of News Corp with The Daily. 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.
- WhaleBiologist 14y ago
  As far as I see it, with piracy rates around 90%, going freemium is the only way a dev can make money these days. It's sad how these kids don't realize they are killing the platform they are trying to play on.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  What was wrong with the business model of The Daily? What business model should they have chosen? They were using (then brand new) subscription IAPs in the App Store, which were designed as the square hole for their purpose. 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).
madisp 14y ago
I thought that piracy in multiplayer games was a solved problem these days. Even the first Half-Life (1998!) had an online authenticity check.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  And there was ways and means around that, the problem being it's a partially solved problem. Every step that's taken to solve it is broken pretty shortly after, short of sending a man with a gun to watch every single person playing and establish ownership it's not going to be a completely solved problem.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it. 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.
  - rmc 14y ago
    No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it. This is security 101 people. Don't trust what the client says.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      The issue with games however is that often all the actual content and game that you want to get access to actually lives on the client. For example Call of Duty singleplayer campaign. If you have most of your interesting stuff on the server (e.g WoW) then of course it makes sense to do checks server side. This is why DRM is fundamentally broken for singleplayer games (or music , or movies) in that you have to trust the client.
      - rmc 14y ago
hmottestad 14y ago
I'm not an iOS dev, however I remember that games on the playstation sometimes requires updates to be allowed to play on the servers. 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.
piqufoh 14y ago
Apple Game Center is heavily integrated into iOS and provides all sorts of validation features. Surely the devs could just re-release and force users to authenticate through Game Center? 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...
sprash 14y ago
The great fallacy here is the notion that you would sell more without piracy. 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.
- pkolaczk 14y ago
  It is not the problem of lower sales, but of higher costs caused by those 9 additional pirated copies.
  - mnicole 14y ago
    Even if those additional copies weren't pirated, would the revenue from those users have been enough to sustain them?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- czr80 14y ago
  That's not obviously a fallacy. You're assuming that it's impossible that some percentage of the pirates would pay if piracy was eliminated. That seems like too strong an assumption. 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.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Why can't they distribute the game app as a free client for an online service with paid accounts? That would seem to be the simplest and most obvious way to curtail the piracy. Especially given that they do have an online component of the game anyway.
- rtpg 14y ago
  It complicates the process,and when you make paying for something more difficult, people are less likely to do it. 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 ?
  - jmonegro 14y ago
    I've seen games do that, mostly Gameloft's, but it's not perfect (the message was shown to me when I restored my backup with a legitimate copy to another, new device, and wouldn't let me play it. Needless to say, I was annoyed).
    - Turing_Machine 14y ago
      I'm guessing they're using the device's UDID (or some roll-your-own analogue). 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?
  - davedx 14y ago
    It's totally feasible, the problem is whether the people who are distributing the pirated version are also capable of cracking the client the same way e.g. Photoshop cracks work to nullify phone home checks. Fighting piracy always comes with an effort/reward calculation like that.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I don't get why he pulled it. Surely N / 10 (where N is some positive integer) will always be better than 0? 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?
- robert-boehnke 14y ago
  It's a multiplayer game and they could not afford paying the servers they needed
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I wonder if a solution to that might be to take what I will call the "counterstrike model" where the game developer doesn't necessarily have to run all of the game servers themselves. 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.
    - hmottestad 14y ago
      But how do you give accounts to paying customers? The only way I know is through in app purchases.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Simplest way would be to automatically email the customer a link with a long randomly generated number (only valid once) when they purchase, when you hit that URL it prompts you to set a username and password.
sspiff 14y ago
> and if this story serves to scare off would-be iOS devs, then we’re all poorer for the actions of a few. 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".
cletus 14y ago
I've seen the other side of too many of these stories not to be skeptical, if not outright cynical. Let me explain. 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.
- bmeckel 14y ago
  The other huge thing to note here is how few current users are jailbroken. The current jailbreak is a version behind the current OS, so the number of people running it is waaaay lower than it could be. If this was posted while a jailbreak was easily available for the current os, then I could totally believe that the number of pirated copies was an actual issue (as its happened in the past.) but right now? I highly doubt it, especially since those who pirate apps are a smaller subsection of jailbreakers, and with fewer jailbreakers it's just too unlikely.
  - lessnonymous 14y ago
    I'm not an iOS developer, but your comment leads me to believe that I can solve their problem: if( iOS.version < 6 ) quit;
NateDad 14y ago
I can't believe their solution is to not run an online multiplayer game. That's the ONLY kind of game you can assure 100% payment for. They just fail at development. This is a known and solved problem. Look at WoW. You have to log in with a valid account to the game server to play online with people. Yes, it's a slight barrier to entry. Oh well, deal with it, it gets you 100% paying customers. This is not hard.
lucian1900 14y ago
The game could have an in-app payment, whose receipt is checked server-side. Then access to your game is as secure as your server (and its interaction with your app). Still hackable, but not trivially.
josephlord 14y ago
Probably the best solution would be to switch to recurring in-app subscription to the online service. This is I think easier to verify and harder to pirate and should align the revenues with the costs (avoiding getting nice sales up front and not being able to sustain the servers in 18 months time). 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.

41 points by crm114 14y ago

Was there no registration or anything to join the servers? If they have a browser game business, there must have been some sort of account management in place already? Are they going to re-release with a different user scheme, or are they reimbursing customers now? In any case, it's pretty shitty for them. Tbh I wasn't even aware that piracy was such a big issue in iOS. Good to know.

Jabbles 14y ago
Precisely. Surely you can give each purchaser a unique code (hash of transaction number?) to connect to the server with, and only allow one connection per code at a time. (I don't do iOS dev, but I assume this is trivial.) 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?
- hmottestad 14y ago
  I don't think it's trivial. 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.
- taligent 14y ago
  Well it would be a server side check. But even a rudimentary IP address check would be fine to ensure one connection at a time. It is all a bit odd I have to admit.
  - yebyen 14y ago
    Aside from barring users who are legitimately sharing a connection (and not even pirating your app)... 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.
- relix 14y ago
  They don't necessarily know who has pirated and who hasn't. They might just see that there are e.g. 100K people registered on their servers, and they only had 10K sales.
gurkendoktor 14y ago
The problem is that it is hard (impossible) to tell from within an iOS app if it has been purchased legitimately. If you want to give users the convenience to buy the app for $.99 and then start playing, then I don't think you have a chance to add any meaningful validation. I wonder how it would've worked with subscription IAPs. I would guess that they are a big psychological problem to potential legit players. This would have been a great chance to find out. 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.
- tomeric 14y ago
  I have seen a lot of small shops in Thailand that feature iMac's with iTunes accounts that are loaded with apps. People go there, pick out the apps they want, leave their phone there for an hour or so and then pick it up again for a very low fee. 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.
  - cynix 14y ago
    I believe the restriction is that each iTunes account can be synced to 10 devices, and each device can sync with 5 iTunes accounts. So it's very likely that those shops are jailbreaking the phones and installing pirated apps.

raverbashing 14y ago

Well, if you know the pirated copies from the licensed ones you can try to block in the server. 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.

nicholassmith 14y ago
There's starting to be a pushback against developers releasing games for free and monetising through IAP if appears 'excessive', and required for the game. I've seen more than a few comments levied about it, essentially there's a reasonably vocal group who don't want to pay more than 79p for games, and don't want IAP to be necessary for their enjoyment. 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.
- hamai 14y ago
  >burn the paying customers. I don't think they have a problem with that...
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    I imagine if they've pulled the app they'll probably have to go through a refund procedure, but I'm not 100% on that as it's a pretty rare and odd situation.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  > There's starting to be a pushback against developers releasing games for free and monetising through IAP 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.

stuaxo 14y ago

I seem to remember an article before saying this is about the normal ratio. If you think back to the era of amigas and floppy disks it was probably about the same.

meaty 14y ago
I doubt that was even the case, unless you wrote disk copying software. X-Copy Pro was the only bit of software I ever purchased :) Everyone had bags stuffed with 3.5" floppies.
yuchi 14y ago
I remember a photocopied version of Another World anti-piracy booklet from when I was 6. I bought the iOS version, just to "give back".

TheAnimus 14y ago

It is funny, I without hesitation felt sorry for the devs. But then I recalled sighing at the attitudes of News Corp with The Daily. 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.

WhaleBiologist 14y ago
As far as I see it, with piracy rates around 90%, going freemium is the only way a dev can make money these days. It's sad how these kids don't realize they are killing the platform they are trying to play on.
gurkendoktor 14y ago
What was wrong with the business model of The Daily? What business model should they have chosen? They were using (then brand new) subscription IAPs in the App Store, which were designed as the square hole for their purpose. 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).

madisp 14y ago

I thought that piracy in multiplayer games was a solved problem these days. Even the first Half-Life (1998!) had an online authenticity check.

nicholassmith 14y ago
And there was ways and means around that, the problem being it's a partially solved problem. Every step that's taken to solve it is broken pretty shortly after, short of sending a man with a gun to watch every single person playing and establish ownership it's not going to be a completely solved problem.
jiggy2011 14y ago
No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it. 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.
- rmc 14y ago
  No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it. This is security 101 people. Don't trust what the client says.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    The issue with games however is that often all the actual content and game that you want to get access to actually lives on the client. For example Call of Duty singleplayer campaign. If you have most of your interesting stuff on the server (e.g WoW) then of course it makes sense to do checks server side. This is why DRM is fundamentally broken for singleplayer games (or music , or movies) in that you have to trust the client.
    - rmc 14y ago

hmottestad 14y ago

I'm not an iOS dev, however I remember that games on the playstation sometimes requires updates to be allowed to play on the servers. 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.

piqufoh 14y ago

Apple Game Center is heavily integrated into iOS and provides all sorts of validation features. Surely the devs could just re-release and force users to authenticate through Game Center? 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...

sprash 14y ago

The great fallacy here is the notion that you would sell more without piracy. 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.

pkolaczk 14y ago
It is not the problem of lower sales, but of higher costs caused by those 9 additional pirated copies.
- mnicole 14y ago
  Even if those additional copies weren't pirated, would the revenue from those users have been enough to sustain them?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
czr80 14y ago
That's not obviously a fallacy. You're assuming that it's impossible that some percentage of the pirates would pay if piracy was eliminated. That seems like too strong an assumption. 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.

huhtenberg 14y ago

Why can't they distribute the game app as a free client for an online service with paid accounts? That would seem to be the simplest and most obvious way to curtail the piracy. Especially given that they do have an online component of the game anyway.

rtpg 14y ago
It complicates the process,and when you make paying for something more difficult, people are less likely to do it. 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 ?
- jmonegro 14y ago
  I've seen games do that, mostly Gameloft's, but it's not perfect (the message was shown to me when I restored my backup with a legitimate copy to another, new device, and wouldn't let me play it. Needless to say, I was annoyed).
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    I'm guessing they're using the device's UDID (or some roll-your-own analogue). 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?
- davedx 14y ago
  It's totally feasible, the problem is whether the people who are distributing the pirated version are also capable of cracking the client the same way e.g. Photoshop cracks work to nullify phone home checks. Fighting piracy always comes with an effort/reward calculation like that.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I don't get why he pulled it. Surely N / 10 (where N is some positive integer) will always be better than 0? 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?

robert-boehnke 14y ago
It's a multiplayer game and they could not afford paying the servers they needed
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I wonder if a solution to that might be to take what I will call the "counterstrike model" where the game developer doesn't necessarily have to run all of the game servers themselves. 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.
  - hmottestad 14y ago
    But how do you give accounts to paying customers? The only way I know is through in app purchases.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Simplest way would be to automatically email the customer a link with a long randomly generated number (only valid once) when they purchase, when you hit that URL it prompts you to set a username and password.

sspiff 14y ago

> and if this story serves to scare off would-be iOS devs, then we’re all poorer for the actions of a few. 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".

cletus 14y ago

I've seen the other side of too many of these stories not to be skeptical, if not outright cynical. Let me explain. 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.

bmeckel 14y ago
The other huge thing to note here is how few current users are jailbroken. The current jailbreak is a version behind the current OS, so the number of people running it is waaaay lower than it could be. If this was posted while a jailbreak was easily available for the current os, then I could totally believe that the number of pirated copies was an actual issue (as its happened in the past.) but right now? I highly doubt it, especially since those who pirate apps are a smaller subsection of jailbreakers, and with fewer jailbreakers it's just too unlikely.
- lessnonymous 14y ago
  I'm not an iOS developer, but your comment leads me to believe that I can solve their problem: if( iOS.version < 6 ) quit;

NateDad 14y ago

I can't believe their solution is to not run an online multiplayer game. That's the ONLY kind of game you can assure 100% payment for. They just fail at development. This is a known and solved problem. Look at WoW. You have to log in with a valid account to the game server to play online with people. Yes, it's a slight barrier to entry. Oh well, deal with it, it gets you 100% paying customers. This is not hard.

lucian1900 14y ago

The game could have an in-app payment, whose receipt is checked server-side. Then access to your game is as secure as your server (and its interaction with your app). Still hackable, but not trivially.

josephlord 14y ago

Probably the best solution would be to switch to recurring in-app subscription to the online service. This is I think easier to verify and harder to pirate and should align the revenues with the costs (avoiding getting nice sales up front and not being able to sustain the servers in 18 months time). 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.