Analyst: Over 60 Percent Of All iPhone Apps Have Been Pirated

Author: by Staff

Greg Yardley, CEO of Manhattan-based Pinch Media, says that it's a rule, not an exception, that developers of iPhone games will suffer losses to piracy. Pinch Media is a company that provides analytic software for iPhone games, tools that give developers a sense of how their application is performing, how many people are using it, and what players are doing within the game. It also includes a few simple checks to determine whether the game has been pirated. Yardley estimates that about 8 percent of the iPhone app market uses his analytic software, and in today's Gamasutra feature, which takes a broad look at the impact of piracy on the iPhone market, he shares some of his findings. "What we've determined is that over 60 percent of iPhone applications have definitively been pirated based on our checks," he reveals, "and the number is probably higher than that." Of course, Yardley's estimates are limited to applications that use Pinch's analytics -- and given that pirates occasionally disable the tools, as Yardley says, the actual figure outside of his tracking could be greater. While it's impossible to estimate how much money developers are losing, it involves more than the price of the game, he says. "What developers lose is not necessarily the sale," he explains, "because I don't believe pirates would have bought the game if they hadn't stolen it. But when there is a back-end infrastructure associated with a game, that is an ongoing incremental cost that becomes a straight loss for the developer." "Many developers run servers to provide content dynamically, they run high-score servers, and that sort of thing costs money," Yardley adds. "If your application is pirated, you quickly find that cutting steeply into your profit margin, especially given the low price point of iPhone games." What does the typical back-end infrastructure cost a developer? According to Yardley, it is rare to see developers paying more than 10 percent of what they are taking in, but "you need to consider that a pirated game can be used many times over by multiple pirates, and so your losses are multiplied many times over as well." The full feature illuminates the extent of the piracy problem in the iPhone app market, featuring discussions with numerous developers and a close look at the factors at hand.