The latest developer to speak out about piracy is Chris Pruett, the developer of the very popular Wind-up Knight game. His point of view, however, is a little different than Madfinger’s. He took to Twitter to post a series of 10 tweets explaining his thoughts. It started with this:
“Lotta press about Android piracy lately. For the record, our piracy rate is about 12% on Android and about 15% on iOS.“So first of all, he is stating that piracy is happening, but also states that it’s not an Android only problem, with the iOS piracy rate slightly higher than Android. But he goes on to say more on Google+, basically compiling all his tweets into one cohesive statement. Read it after the break.
“When Wind-up Knight for iOS was a paid app, the piracy rate was more like 80%. For both Android and iOS, close to 100% of our pirate users are in China . Those users can’t buy things on Android anyway.Piracy is obviously a problem, but perhaps it’s not as big a problem as some would think. Pruett makes a good point that most pirates would never have purchased the app in the first place, so it’s not really a lost sale. China seems to be the biggest culprit, and they can’t buy apps in the Play Store anyway. By being a free app and looking for alternative revenue streams, such as in-game advertising, many Android developers can avoid the piracy issue.
I think piracy is, as always, a red herring. You can’t stop it, but as long as it’s slightly arduous, it’s not a lot of lost sales. Because a huge number of people who pirate software would never buy it in a million years. You aren’t losing a sale to them. Piracy starts to matter only when pirate users can cost you money in other ways, e.g. network bandwidth and server cost. Yet another reason to be a free app in today’s mobile marketplace.“
Source: twitter
