Google is not the piracy police and therefore will not waste loads of resources into investigating if there is really an illegal activity foregoing. On the other side, you cannot beat them.
Stay with what it is: You simply cannot stop piracy. And users who will hunt only for pirated version would still not buy your app if there would be no piracy at all. That’s the simple thing. Piracy is not that big problem as someone will tell you. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck. But piracy was always there.
You buy a DVD: You cannot watch it on Computer because of Copy Protection. You cannot skip the FBI warnings about piracy. You need to select the language in which you want to see the FBI warning.
Pirater: Downloads the movie, enjoys the movie (no warnings, no interruptions)
So where does the buyer get anything better than the pirater … nowhere he got less quality
With games it is the same. If someone likes your game, he will buy it. Or he will at least talk about it to his friends (and some of those buy it).
We all know the problem with Steam for example. Steam cannot connect, you cannot play your legal bought game. Drives me crazy!!!
So, Devs should not care about piracy that much … Better care for a good game, care for your paying customers.
Just because 40% have pirated your game does not mean, that those 40% would’ve bought your game … something that the music industry does not understand.
The best is when people cancel the purchase and then buy it again. Probably because they tried to copy the APK and because of the licence check it didn’t work - so it’s always worth to add a simple licence check. I even had one guy complain about the licence check after he cancelled the order.
Yeah, the license check is the best option nowadays. I would go one step further and if the license check is not valid, install all known to man ad networks (a couple or 3 icon ads, 8 pushes per day, you name it … :))
Absolutely right. People steal not just out of necessity but even when they could afford something. Most piracy happens because there was no intention to buy in the first place.
The “copy protection” schemes that always made me feel the worst when I was young and broke and didn’t pay for much of my desktop software were the ones that let me keep using it anyway. At the simplest it would be an alert when you first launch that says something along the lines of how the developer understands that not everyone can afford to pay for software, but he hopes that you like the software enough that you do pay for it when you finally can. Getting the user to sympathize with you goes a long way in my opinion–taking drastic measures to prevent piracy turns it into more of a game… instead of the user feeling bad that they’re using your software without paying, they’re more likely to feel triumphant that they beat whatever copy protection scheme you’ve put in place. If I were to release a paid app that was having piracy issues and I could reliably identify pirates (via the licensing verification or whatever methods are available), I’d probably take that kind of approach. A few ideas that spring to mind:
To-do app that inserts a new item every few months saying “Buy a legit copy of this to-do app that I’ve been enjoying for X months”
Podcasting client that occasionally injects an anti-piracy PSA spoof at the beginning of episodes
If it was a game, incorporate something in-character like occasional messages/dialogue from NPCs nebulously urging the player to do the right thing
You could also take the “developer’s revenge” approach and let the user “think” they got away with pirating the software, but subtly sabotage them. Enabling ad networks would be one approach, but I also like the old C&C Red Alert 2 approach, where they’d let you play each game normally for a random amount of time before everything that you’ve built up suddenly gets spontaneously nuked and all of your units die instantly… or like Earthbound which would let you play normally all the way up to the final boss, then destroy all your save games and start over from the beginning. Even if it didn’t actually curb piracy, you’d at least be able to revel in the idea that you’re pissing some of them off as much as their piracy pisses you off
