iPhone Game Dev Credits Piracy for Doubling His Sales

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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iPhone Game Dev Credits Piracy for Doubling His Sales


Daniel Amitay, the creator of the iPhone app Punch 'Em! [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id356087514?mt=8], says piracy is to thank for more than doubling his sales.

Game makers don't like piracy because, simply put, it costs them money. When somebody steals a game, developers don't get paid and despite what you may think about artistic expression for its own sake, that doesn't put food on the table. It's a valid point, generally speaking, and it's also well-rehearsed party line, which is what makes it especially unusual when a dev - an indie, no less - admits that piracy is actually doing him some good.

Punch 'Em! is a fairly simple 99 cent game that lets people virtually fight each other through their iPhone cameras. It was Amitay's first paid app and the recently-passed holiday season was his first as an app developer. He'd intended to write up a blog post about how the season gave his sales a substantial push, but as he examined the trends he came to a surprising realization: the holidays weren't responsible for his sales jump. Piracy was.

Amitay looked at two 17-day stretches, December 4 to 20 and December 30 to January 15, putting together a sales and piracy graph plotting the data. Over the first period, sales and piracy run flat, with sales appearing to marginally outpace piracy. But just before Christmas there was a "huge pirating push against Punch 'Em!" reflected in a piracy rate in the second time period almost 39 times higher than the first. But something else happened, too. Amitay's sales during that same stretch of time more than doubled.

He said he's still against piracy for the simple reason that it's stealing but added that at the end of the day, business is business. "Throughout Punch 'Em!'s paid lifetime, I couldn't raise its sales count in the long term," he explained on his blog [http://amitay.us/Blog/Entries/2011/1/17_piracy_doubled_my_app_sales.html]. "So if thousands of users end up pirating my app, but hundreds buy it as a result of hearing about it from their pirate buddies, why should I cry?"

He also noted that an earlier version of the game included a code which checked to see if it had been cracked and if so, displayed a message asking the user to purchase the app and then exited. But that ultimately did more harm than good, as the game was pirated very little but his conversion rate was zero. "After all," he asked, "my app quit almost immediately, so why share it at all?"

And how does he know the holiday season isn't actually responsible for the bump? Sales tend to jump immediately following Christmas but the effect only lasts for a few days and app rankings don't change because everyone takes advantage of the same push. In his case, however, the situation is different. "My sales increase extended well past Christmas, and is still stable," he said. "My sales increase during Christmas was well beyond the standard 2x [caused by the holidays]. My app increased in rank over the period of time that my app was pirated."

It's an unusual perspective but under the circumstances, not an altogether surprising one. I don't imagine that Amitay wants to be seen as advocating for piracy but since most developers are critical of piracy because it costs them money, it's not unreasonable for him to be a little more upbeat about it when it's actually bringing some in. "Bottom line: people stealing my app has increased my sales," he said. "The alternative for me is no pirates, but fewer sales." And that's not really much of an alternative at all.

via: Twitter [http://twitter.com/AtmanRising/status/29641460588486656]


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manaman

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Sep 2, 2007
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Gezz people, stop sending me conflicted messages here is piracy the devil or not. Please tell me what to think!
 

FlashHero

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Apr 3, 2010
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Where do ppl get these number for pirated copies anyway?

Im serious. I honesty have no clue how that magic works.
 

mjc0961

YOU'RE a pie chart.
Nov 30, 2009
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Hmm... If he can make it stop the game if its pirated, why not just turn it into a demo or something? Let them play it a bit, and then have it butt-in and say "Okay, you've played it for free enough. If you want to keep going, please buy this app." and then have it close.
 

Ossian

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Mar 11, 2010
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What do you say to that extra credits?

Proves my point, Piracy can do good, not saying the act itself is good, but it does result in good things.
 

Eri

The Light of Dawn
Feb 21, 2009
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.99$ just goes to show people pirate no matter the price. "i can't afford it" not even close to an excuse for this game.
 

CitySquirrel

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Jun 1, 2010
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You know how when anyone pulls out a games cause violence study and we all remind them that correlation does not mean causation? Yeah, same thing here. If the game experienced a surge of awareness both sales and piracy would rise.
 

Andronicus

Terror Australis
Mar 25, 2009
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Oh god, I hope pirates don't manage to twist this into just another justification ("I pirate games because it actually helps the developer! Go me!"). Piracy doesn't help game sales, awareness of the game does. If he found another way to get his app known, like, oh, I don't know, advertising, then I see no reason why his sales wouldn't double anyway. "Stealing equals increased sales" is the wrong message to send.
 

Wicky_42

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Sep 15, 2008
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CitySquirrel said:
You know how when anyone pulls out a games cause violence study and we all remind them that correlation does not mean causation? Yeah, same thing here. If the game experienced a surge of awareness both sales and piracy would rise.
Yep, too true. It's interesting that they both rose so much over the same 11 day period - what happened over that Christmas week that changed the graph so much? Who told that apparently large chunk of people to pirate it? I mean, it's hard to feel how many purchases there were cos the graph isn't labelled (Andy, you lose a cookie), but that's a pretty huge shift to happen spontaneously :/

For that matter, why is the scale so fucked up there? It's at 2 day intervals up until that week, then boom with an 11 day interval exaggerating the sales spike. The most transparent example of statistical misleading I've seen for a while!
 

Ewyx

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Dec 3, 2008
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Eri said:
.99$ just goes to show people pirate no matter the price. "i can't afford it" not even close to an excuse for this game.
How about the fact that most people don't like dealing with the AppStore and most people don't like the fact that apple is pretty bitchy about what you can do with YOUR cellphone and what you can't.

Maybe in this case, it's not just about the dev, but about Apple's bad business practices.
 

The Random One

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May 29, 2008
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Correlation does not imply causation. What I think I'm seeing here is an increase in awareness of the game, which caused an increase in both pirating and sales of the game, which is to say, an increase in aquistions.

I don't know what might have caused it, but it seems more likely that pirates suddenly start simultaneously pirating it and then telling about it to their non-pirating buddies.
 

Georgie_Leech

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Nov 10, 2009
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It seems far more likely that over the 10-day gap, Word-of-mouth made his app more popular and thus increased sales. Along with that comes a massive increase in piracy, as many people who are only semi-interested now have knowledge of it.

EDIT: Blasted connection... leave me hanging for 10 minutes...

What the guy above me said.
 

Snotnarok

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Nov 17, 2008
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I like how people are already saying things against piracy here like how it's just 99cents. Well some people don't like apple or their way of dealing with things and they jail broke their device. And Apple being the big nazi company they are will do anything to screw your device over once jail broken so some people just go fuck it and pirate it. It's kind of a lose lose situation, are they not in the right but it's not because of the just price sheesh.

There's many reasons people pirate games, I pirate games to see if they'll run on my PC, you know because so many developers release demos to test it on your hardware. I'm looking at you Activision and Cliffy B. Once I find if it runs on my system I go out and buy it...


I'm sorry, let me repeat that for you people who don't think piracy makes me buy my games.

Once I find if it runs on my system



I go out and buy it...


I'm JUST saying guys.
 

Blazingdragoon04

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May 22, 2009
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Correlation is not Causation. The more likely reason is the fact that, during his "stretch" of missing data time was Christmas, where people get gifts, like iPhones. The most likely reason for this increase is due to the fact that more people got iphones for Christmas, thus a new market of people who are more likely to download apps to their brand new iPhone reached the market, found this app, and downloaded it.

The other explanation is that someone wrote an article between those 10 days that brought attention to the game, leading more people to pirate and download it.

However, to say that the increased piracy actually CAUSED the increase in sales is just flat out stupid, and is more than likely just an attempt to grab some attention using the hot piracy issue because I can't reasonably believe that someone who could program an iPhone app would be that dumb.
 

Devil's Due

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Sep 27, 2008
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I love all these "we pirate .99 cent games because we don't like apple!"

Yeah, that doesn't fly, since you're not hurting apple, since you already bought their ipods and iphones. Pirating the game hurts the game MAKER.

I love pirates and their twisted sense of morales. And for the thread? I think it's just the holiday season that was the reason for the large sells. I mean come on, it was near Christmas! It doesn't take a genius to realize this.
 

Olrod

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Feb 11, 2010
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So what caused the initial spike?

How did all these people find out about Punch 'Em! to begin with on the 20th of December?