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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

I don't get why he pulled it. Surely N / 10 (where N is some positive integer) will always be better than 0?

What is more interesting here though is that (AFAIK) the only way to run pirated iOS games is to jailbreak your phone/tablet. I'm going to assume that waaay less than 90% of iOS users jailbreak their phone.

So this either means that people who are interested in iOS games are far more likely to jailbreak that people who aren't gamers (not an unreasonable hypothesis but 90% still seems high).

Or there's something about this particular game that makes it especially appealing to jailbreakers?

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It's just so much easier to download a game for free when jailbroken. Many probably just downloaded it to try and then forgot about it.

Unfortunately it's very hard to get stats to show the number of server hours used by pirates vs. non-pirates.

It's a multiplayer game and they could not afford paying the servers they needed

I wonder if a solution to that might be to take what I will call the "counterstrike model" where the game developer doesn't necessarily have to run all of the game servers themselves.

In other words , when you run the game you get a selection of servers to play on. If you want to play on the official servers you need an account from the developer (which you get when you buy it) but if you are a pirate user you get to run on any of the unofficial servers only. Of course paying customers will be able to use either official or unofficial servers.

But how do you give accounts to paying customers?

The only way I know is through in app purchases.

Simplest way would be to automatically email the customer a link with a long randomly generated number (only valid once) when they purchase, when you hit that URL it prompts you to set a username and password.

Does the email address come on the purchase report to the seller from Apple?

I have no idea, not an iOS developer. I assume there must be some API or email proxy that you can use to contact customers if they don't reveal the actual address.

I don't think there is a way to get any details at all about a specific purchase on the app store except when using in app purchases.

When using in app purchases you will get a receipt from apple that is signed with their certificate that you can process and send to your own servers to limit pirates from accessing the servers.

That depends on whether or not there is a cost per user. If there is a server-side component checking for cheating or multiplayer functionality (from what I gathered by skimming, there is), and whether they are using 3rd party support services (bug reports, notifications, whatever).

If any of the above are true, they are paying for people to steal from him. On top of that, there's nothing worse than knowing you spent a lot of time building something to have people steal it from you because they're too cheap to drop $1, $5, $10 despite how much time or return it gives them.

One of my company's most popular (Android) apps has a 50% piracy rate and it irritates me to no end.

Regarding your first line, my initial response was exactly the same on reading the title of the submission on here. But before commenting I read the article and came across this:

"A multiplayer game like Battle Dungeon requires servers to host matches – servers that Hunted Cow has to pay to maintain. ”If they were all legitimate sales, it would have given us the resources to work on it further, however the way it was going it just wasn’t viable.”"

That seemed like a reasonable explanation to me. Since I assume you too read the submission before commenting, I'm interested what part of the above explanation you disagree with.

Surely the answer is either to control server access or let other people do the hosting for you?

Removing your app (that presumably you invested resources into developing) for something trivial seems crazy.

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