Arrrrr. The pirates have plundered StarDunk

Anyone know if in-app purchase works on pirated apps? They could always do a free in-app purchase to enable network play.

The AppStore has household licensing. If you have two kids, you can buy one copy of the software and install it on both devices. For games that are more likely to be used by kids, this should be a pretty common situation. I bet the real number of pirates is quite a bit smaller.

I found it remarkable that a developer can be smart enough to craft such a beautiful, fun game ...

...but stupid enough not to understand how the iTunes licensing system works.

One purchase, multiple devices, unknown numbers of accounts. It isn't hard to understand.

And shame on TUAW for hauling out the "piracy" card without any proof at all to show for it.

I think this is yet another example of a software co. claiming a ridiculously high % of piracy when in reality the number is mostly a guess on their part.

Didn't a couple apps in the past have an anti piracy function? It would give an error at the start of the program saying they didn't buy it. What happened to things like that.

-K
http://www.khurramkalam.com

The scenario of one family, one iPad, multiple Plus+ accounts, all sharing the same app is highly feasible. Each kid in the family may want to protect their own score histories. I don't think the assumed metric of counting all those Plus+ accounts as pointing to cracked or pirated copies is necessarily accurate.

I have at least one iPad and one iPhone sharing the same downloaded IOS app. Vendors may have to assume the 'family-pack' marketing scenario when selling a single app; there are a whole lot of people with the same app on two devices at least.

There was a developer for Jailbroken iPhones that a year or so ago showed a "proof of concept" that would help combat App piracy.

They had a solution - implemented during the development/compilation stage - that worked in conjunction with Apple's iTunes DRM that allowed Apps to run on multiple devices under one account, but could not be (as easily) cracked as compared to ITunes.

We are actually counting the number of unique accounts, so if you install the game on iPad/iPod/iPhone multiple time and still use the same account we will count this as one game bought.
So yes, we might count a few users who have multiple account but that should only be a few.

@Donn, I definitely agree with you regarding focusing on the right customers.

On Android, where apps can be easily side loaded, app piracy is purported to be much, much higher. Almost to the point where there's little financial incentive to develop for the platform.

So either Android has a higher percentage of pirates by default, or the ease by which an app can be pirated makes a difference in the piracy rate.

Some people won't pay for anything. Some won't pay if -- big if -- they can get it for free. And some people believe in paying for value received.

The middle group is what we're discussing here.

"it's certain that someone is going to find a way to stop the piracy."

Really? It's certain?

I think I remember Microsoft saying something like that about Windows piracy......in 1990....

I'm not condoning piracy, but that is a ridiculous statement.