With over 17,000 active gamers playing its game ‘Fingerkicks’, software developer Gamized was surprised to see its iTunesConnect purchase report show only 1,163 copies sold. Gamized believes Apple has a major piracy problem on its hands and addressed the Cupertino team by calling the problem “humiliating”.
Gamized enter the app rush producing games for other companies. It was not until earlier this year that it decided to stake its claim with the launch of ‘Fingerkicks’. The soccer game quickly landing more than 17,000 active players after just a few days on the App Store. Under normal circumstances this would signal success.
Price at £.99, Gamized expected to see £16,830 in sales before Apple’s 30 percent commission, leave £11,781 in pure profit for its hard work. “Unfortunately, the reality is that we’ve collected less than £800 in sales for FingerKicks, and Apple’s policies (or lack thereof) are the primary reason for the huge losses,” says Fonseca in a blog post.
So how do you explain the discrepancy between active players and sales? According to thinq,co.uk, the answer lies in jailbreaking. The availability and ease at which current solution jailbreak iOS devices has proven to be a serious threat to game developer profits. 91 percent of users playing ‘Fingerkicks’ have taken advantage of this perk.
Unfortunately, while we sympathize with Gamized, the truth is there’s no way to be 100 percent effective in the fight against piracy. With enough will power and resources anything is possible and the fact remains there’s no shortage of hatred against Apple. For Gamized, they’ve realized that “until Apple fully embraces the issue and supports their vendors and suppliers, we will be forced to re-evaluate our plans for other iOS games until Apple fixes this humiliating piracy problem.”
Until we see a wide-scale survey that confirms other developers are suffering from a similar percentage of piracy, it would be premature to consider Gamized’s situation to be universal. One thing to keep in mind is that iOS 5 will inadvertently curb a large percentage of piracy due to over the air (OTA) updates. Rather than massive 400MB downloads, updates will only include small, incremental modifications to the core. This presents a a serious challenge to jailbreakers.
Other than OTA updates, how can Apple help developers like Gamized from piracy? Is it Apple’s responsibility to battle the jailbreaking community when Apple itself is losing a potential 30 percent in commission from each pirated copy? Sound off.
