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Comment by fasteddie | Hacker News Reader

This is partially because it is much, much, easier to pirate premium games on Android than it is on iOS. There are tons of 3rd party APK sites that are well trafficked. On F2P the platforms are much more equally split.

Also, as Android has a higher footprint in Asia, making games that resonate with the Japanese/Korean audience is pretty important, and I'm not sure if Monument Valley qualifies.

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This is 100% true. Advertising-based revenue models are far superior on Android due to piracy. I have a Google alert set up for our games, and updates hit APK sites less than 24 hours after hitting the play store.

That would be super frustrating. Is there just no recourse for sites like this? I assume they are hosted overseas, but do hosts not respond at all to complaints?

You'd be playing wack-a-mole so hard that your legal team would cost more than any gains. I had similar google alerts as the previous poster, and the sites would have every single popular game -- I don't think anyone fought it effectively, although I never did a true survey.

> This is partially because it is much, much, easier to pirate premium games on Android than it is on iOS.

While that's true, that's no different from PC games and they still make considerably more than android games do. There's definitely an X factor here.

I think the stigma with pirating a premium PC game is higher than "just" pirating an Android game. I know a lot of people who see mobile apps as disposable and so have no problem downloading them for free. A PC game like Doom carries a different weight to it that makes these same people at least consider the premium purchase. Not saying it makes any sense, but that's been my observation.

It's certainly more difficult to pirate a PC game than an android game. Maybe the difficulty of figuring out how to run cracks and the fear of accidentally downloading a virus is the X factor. The whole process is much easier, less riskier and overall feels "nicer" than pirating a PC game or app, that's for sure.

Brr. My phone is even more personal than my computer. There is no way I'm putting a pirated APK on it, considering how easy it is to insert arbitrary code into APKs: http://www.georgiecasey.com/2013/03/06/inserting-keylogger-c...

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