Developers express concern over pirated games on Android Market

**merman1974** · 03-17-2011, 04:15 AM

From The Guardian website's Technology blog:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...games-concerns

One of the main concerns here is one particular company that seems to be finding a game, slightly tweaking it in looks and name, and then "releasing" it on the Android Market as a completely new game...

**TechMaster** · 03-17-2011, 06:05 AM

While I don't approve of such behavior, Joyworld's World Wars looks better than Chillingo's The War. Graphics are cleaner.

But Seriously, the complaint about lack of discoverability is weak. If your App is good it will show up eventually and get good reviews and mentions on the gaming sites. This Kevin Baker's game is a Space shoot em. Come up with something new or fade into the noise of all the other Space shoot em ups. As for the piracy thing, I'm not sure what can be done. Maybe the Amazon market will be the answer. Worst case, he may need to take legal action. One or 2 of those might wake Google up and pay more attention to reports of such obvious cases.

The malware issues are bound to happen in a free and open architecture, just like it did with Windows. It takes a little caution and self responsibility if you decide to go with the freedom provided with the Android based design.

If you are not comfortable with that then stay behind your policed walled in community. You may not get to do what you want when you want to, but hey, you are safe if Steve Jobs tells you its ok, especially if your phone is Blue because blue is the safest color phone according to Steve, right?

**wildo2ne** · 03-17-2011, 06:17 AM

there is a way to handle the piracy issue but most developers will not go through with it, I recently got a app that goes out to a licensing server every time I open it to make sure that it is legit.

**alexjlopez** · 03-17-2011, 06:23 AM

I think the problem is bigger than a lot of Android fans are willing to admit. When you can purchase legitimately through Google's marketplace Rom Buddy and half a dozen rom downloader libraries along with emulators to play those games, someone's intellectual property is being violated.

It's quite a different thing to jailbreak or root and then manually load homebrew apps to do these things. But we're talking real dollars changing hands (and Google presumably getting a cut) for piracy. There are also tons of games and even movie streaming apps that are blatant piracy that require no rooting to use.

I think this is bad for the platform in the long run--it might be fun for the moment, but when the hammer falls I think the result will be a marketplace that is every bit as policed as Apple's if they expect to maintain a civil relationship with the developer community and protect people's property.

Can you imagine if I opened a web-shop on the internet selling emulators and roms for every console? It's an anomaly that Google hasn't been sued at this point, but I'm sure it's coming.

**TechMaster** · 03-17-2011, 07:18 AM

I'm sure Google will have to eventually start properly enforcing its policies. It's just a matter of time before the big names like Nintendo and Sony actually catch on to the Rom Buddy type apps, just like they eventually went after the ROM Sites on the Web.
As for illegal TV streaming apps, I saw one advertised just today and when I checked it out it was off the market. So Google is slowly starting to police. As I said it's just a matter of time.

I still don't think it will become the same as Apple's walled garden however.

**wildo2ne** · 03-17-2011, 10:05 AM

Shane had covered this topic a long time ago in Retrogaming Radio, he pointed out that although it can get out of hand at the same time the developers are also profiting from the piracy by increased exposure to their products as it is passed around to more people. He even went as far as (at least in the show talking about it) considering releasing some of his own copyrighted software anonymously just to get it out there.

Piracy can be a troublesome issue but it also benefits people. I downloaded the movie Dodgeball, now this is a movie that was ok but I would never pay to see it in the theater, pay to own the movie, or pay to rent the movie. Yet when I showed it to some friends 3 of them went out and bought the movie, now I just generated 3 new sales for them that they may not have gotten as it was not a A list movie and thus the only way these people got to see it is because I downloaded it.

Shane also talked about how companies bitch about losing money to piracy which is a load of crap as they did not lose any money because no one spent the money. You can't lose what you don't have and if no one bought the product you can't lose the money on the product. The more accurate description would be that they came up short on their projected earnings for the product, but yelling about how they are losing money hand over fist sounds more impressive and gets people more riled up.

And finally there is a piece out right now where a company did a study on piracy and found that the problem is not that people are leeches and want something for free, it is that the precieved value of the product is not inline with what the companies are charging for it. According to the article they need to slash the prices of their goods, if they do this it will limit piracy. You will never get rid of it completely but the majority of the people don't mind paying for something if the price is right, just look at the itunes store.

**merman1974** · 03-17-2011, 10:21 AM

Just to clarify, this is about developers CLONING games more than piracy. The same thing has been happening on iOS.

**Womp** · 03-17-2011, 12:55 PM

If I were these devs I would be 2000% more worried about the piracy on Installous for the iPhone, Touch and iPad. It is a totally polished recreation of the Apple app store with every app and game up for grabs for free and it takes mere minutes to enable.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

**WorknMan** · 03-17-2011, 01:02 PM

Originally Posted by alexjlopez

I think the problem is bigger than a lot of Android fans are willing to admit. When you can purchase legitimately through Google's marketplace Rom Buddy and half a dozen rom downloader libraries along with emulators to play those games, someone's intellectual property is being violated.

It's quite a different thing to jailbreak or root and then manually load homebrew apps to do these things. But we're talking real dollars changing hands (and Google presumably getting a cut) for piracy. There are also tons of games and even movie streaming apps that are blatant piracy that require no rooting to use.

If I were game companies like Nintendo, I'd have a virtual console up and running on Android. Don't expect me to feel sympathetic if people are pirating your wares on Android, if you won't offer them a legal alternative on the platform.

**alexjlopez** · 03-17-2011, 02:02 PM

Originally Posted by Womp

If I were these devs I would be 2000% more worried about the piracy on Installous for the iPhone, Touch and iPad. It is a totally polished recreation of the Apple app store with every app and game up for grabs for free and it takes mere minutes to enable.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

There will always be jailbreak or root-based hacking and homebrew. But for Google to sell pirated games officially for money in their marketplace is unprecedented. You can't compare it to installous, which requires a jailbroken device and where Apple isn't directly profiting from piracy (if anything, they are losing money due to it).