There's a difference between being capable of buying your app (having money) and be willing to buy YOUR app. It goes back to my point above, which was that if every game on the app store was the same price, the games that indie developers create are going to have a really hard time vying for attention. So just because a pirate has a dollar in his wallet and pirates your app doesn't mean that you would have gotten that dollar. He would have seen that your app was protected against piracy, and downloaded one of the other 100k app on the store for free. The problem isn't much different though, even for big developers. If I had a jailbroken phone I would download TONS of apps that I'm hesitant to buy right now because of price. An example of this would be the recent Gameloft sale which knocked down a bunch of their $4.99 games to $0.99. Even at $0.99, many of these titles I was not interested in purchasing. The only way I would download these titles is if they were free. If I had decided to pirate these games, Gameloft would have lost no sales, because I was not interested in purchasing them at any price. That's the thing about piracy, you could make it 1 cent and people would still pirate it. Some people are too cheap to pay anything for your game and you can't worry about it too much. Yes, I would agree that it is naive to think you are losing no sales at all -- of course you are. However, I think it's equally naive to assume that any large percent of the pirates would have purchased your game, had they not been able to pirate it.
Let's be realistic for one minute, if one can have a game for free, he will get it. Even if he was a potential buyer. Come on people, we are talking about humans here ...
So, you can get games for free. Do you buy them? Or are you not human? human != thief pirate != lost sale I could easily jailbreak and pirate apps, but I don't. I assume you are the same. Your argument makes no sense.
I think it's a little simplistic to say either that pirates are stealing money from devs or that pirates would never buy the game in first place and are in fact positive. Those that are very, very determined to pirate an app, no matter how cheap, are unlikely to ever buy it, but when piracey becomes so easy, such as is the case with iPhone and iPod touch then there is a crossover. Some sales will be lost because consumers have become pirates by virtue of ease and then the issue lies with the platform holder to prevent it, otherwise sales plumit and developers move elsewhere leaving the platform desolate. However, one of the upsides of piracy is that their is a viral effect and the pirates will influence consumers to purchase a game and that it makes the platform more desirable. Perhaps part of the appeal of the iPhone and iPod touch is the benefits of being able to Jail Break it and then people fall in to piracy. These are my views and not that of Mobile Pie's by the way.
if ur app was pirated, nothing you could do. But it might make you feel better if you look at the matter in a different perspective. Be glad that people enjoy your creation, and someone even care enough to take time hacking the game.
Meteor Blitz - Alley Labs' Anti-Piracy Techniques I was the lead developer on Meteor Blitz (App Store link: http://bit.ly/NSHV8) and I'm pretty much on TA every day I think the anti-piracy we implemented for MB turned out to be relatively successful. Here's a quick rundown: There are basically two ways iPhone games are cracked: 1. Pirates use a tool to get around Apple's generic copyright protection. This tool is easy-to-find, is almost automatic, and works on pretty much every application. Fortunately, it's easy to detect if an app has been cracked using this technique: http://alleylabs.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/how-to-prevent-iphone-app-piracy/ 2. A pirate manually goes into your app, searches for the flag to enable everything in your game, turns it on, and uploads the new version of your game. As far as I know, there's not much you can do about this. If MB detects that it's been cracked using technique #1, it will go into "cracked" mode. In this mode, only Arcade mode is available, and only the first world is available. There are 2 key things going on: 1. We designed MB so that pirates typically can't tell that the game is in "cracked" mode. We don't display any kind of message or anything up front. If a new player played the "cracked" mode for less than 5-10 minutes, they would think it's the full game. This way, after pirates run the automated tool, they think the game is fully cracked and go ahead and upload the game to all the pirate sites. Essentially, they're marketing and distributing the free version of our game for us 2. After the first world in the game (which takes a while to complete), we end the game and display the same marketing screen we use in the free version of MB, complete with a link to the App Store. Most piracy occurs right when the game is released. For MB, it took less than an hour for pirates to get around Apple's copyright protection, and about 5 days to manually unlock everything else. Here's how we took advantage: 1. In those first 5 days, anyone who downloaded a cracked copy of the game (which was a lot) and wanted the full version had to legitimately buy it. We hoped that people were addicted enough to our game by then to not mind paying for the full version. We also made it as easy as possible for them to give us money. 2. After the fully cracked version came out, there was a lot of confusion on the pirate sites as to which cracked copy was "fully cracked". Even months later now, most people are unwittingly downloading the lite version of MB. We think that the confusion and frustration is enough to make a significant number of people just suck it up and go to the App Store to buy MB for real. Hope this helps!
Sorry I didn't quote the whole thing. As a developer, I'm not a big fan of any type of protection schemes beyond what Apple provides. If you think you are losing money to pirates, imagine how much money Apple is losing to Pirates. There are over 100,000 apps in the app store, and when it comes to money, Apple doesn't take things lightly. However, I really don't see anything wrong with hyungs method on the surface. It doesn't really stop piracy altogether, but instead attempts to use the piracy to distribute the free/lite version. However, my experience shows that trying to access a game I bought years ago often results in frustration. Technically, any game I bought 10 years ago should run on my current device, assuming it is the same OS/Hardware. Now I know iPhone is only a couple years old. However I'm going to be pissed if the games I purchase today don't run on my iPhone G5 or G7 or whatever, or if my legitimately purchased game is limited to the FREE version. I am co-creator of Snails, a highly popular game on PocketPC (Windows Mobile). Snails contained a retarded method of protection and it STILL pisses me off that I couldn't install a game that I created on my most recent PocketPC (which I don't use anymore- got an iPhone instead).
I actually think hyung's post should be stickied (or made into a new topic with replies disabled and stickied), cause we get a few developers around here asking about combating piracy and usually the best we can do (speaking from a consumer standpoint rather than a dev) is tell them the name of a dev that we know has had a similar problem. 99% of these guys aren't rich and as a whole, TA looks down on piracy so if this method helps people out it should be recognized and the post easier to find.
You mean the pirate manually investigate our code and modify the code themselves? Or the software just directly enable all the flags in our game?
Did I talk about EVERYONE ? Read again. Just meant that when you just take the majority of humans, if they have the opportunity to have a commercial product for free, they won't buy it. Come on, look at your post history, you're just denying every single bit of sentence which contains the word "Pirate". It's not an objective point of view. Pirate == potential lost sale, just stick with it. Quoting for truth :
Nope, I mean pirates will probably scan the application memory while the app is running and try to find which byte to change to get the effect they want. Or they can try to decompile and read the assembly language to try to find a simple place to unlock everything they want. I'm definitely not an expert at cracking, so I could have some of the details wrong here. But I know for sure they don't have any way of actually seeing your source code.
I just got a comment on my Youtube Video from a kid who goes to School with my son saying "Hey ur Jacks dad I got ur Game on **********!!!!!" Which I of course deleted. I also told Jack to Kick him in the nuts...
Wow, I probably shouldn't have posted the name of a well known iphone pirate resource in that message anyway but nice to see TA replaced it with *******
@c0re, From here on out I'm going to have to ignore you. "Potential lost sale" is fine, but it isn't probable. And if you look carefully you'll see your logic leads to the conclusion that everyone pirates apps since you argue that "if one can have a game for free, he will get it," which we all know everyone and anyone can get games for free. We also know that people do buy games that are available for free. I myself am proof of that much. Most of my recent posts are responses to your weird twisted logic and half-baked plans. This is the last response I'll have for you though. Thank you for caring so much. Your heart is in the right place, but you just aren't making sensible statements.
Even this is too much I think. I only came to this conclusion today and here's why. My hard drive failed earlier this week. Luckily I backup on a fairly regular basis. However I did lose a few days worth of data. That included some games I bought. I tried to sync the iPod Touch because that _usually_ puts games back onto the computer BUT something funny happened during the restore and iTunes wouldn't authorize. I then got a message that iTunes would delete any apps not in iTunes already. I clicked cancel, but iTunes went ahead and wiped out about five or six games. Of course it isn't all that difficult to get them back on, but now I've lost all my progress. I'm pretty much done with most of those games now. I can't stand repeating things like that. Worse still, if that happened and I didn't have an internet connection they'd just be gone. Now imagine if Apple's authorization system disappears. You can be 100% sure everything we've all bought will too. EDIT: ps. one of those games was Flickitty, which I am really enjoying. Lucky for me, I hadn't gotten very far in your game yet!
Oh god, what a relief. My logic is what you understand of it. And you understand it ... not (even if I re-explained it several times). To make it short : Now you can go psychic on someone else.
You should have authorised the computer before you synched. A friend had this problem only yesterday. You will also be able to download anything you paid for again without paying.
Makes perfect sense to me. Mr. Innocent: I think I'll buy a game on the App Store! Mr. Pirate: You can get it free right here *provides link* Mr. Innocent: Sweet dude, you just saved me $0.99! Along the same lines, my sister downloads Nintendo DS games for free. She used to buy them, then someone told her how to get them for nothing. If the illegal versions suddenly became unavailable, do you think she'd just stop using her DS? No chance, she'd go back to paying for the games.
I'll fix it for you: It might be hard for you to believe, but some of us actually think paying for stuff we use is actually OK.
