Piracy on the Android platform is not news anymore, its a way of life. That’s not ideal for premium application developers like us. Lots of resources go into the designing, prototyping building and marketing a mobile game. Our hard work is then taken and distributed for free by third parties. We have anywhere between 30% to 40% of our players on Dirt Trackin Sprint Cars playing on a pirated copy right now.
The options for developers to date are to either ignore this behaviour and accept that non-paying users will always be that way or invest in technology to detect pirated copies and ban these players. None are ideal. Ignoring pirates is only a temporary solution when you have an online game where you pay for CCUs. Banning these users may result in frustration if this happens for legitimate users.
We’ve been in touch with services like TapCore. They help you monetise pirated copies of your game released through third parties – sounds nice right? But what about the bigger picture? Doesn’t implementing such SDK’s feels like promoting piracy? McAffee recently reported that pirated copies are used to sell social media accounts in the black market.
How do you feel about this? You can reach us on info@flyingsquirrelinteractive.com if you want to know more about this or any of the other game development services we provide.
