well first off those are pc games not ios.. though i seriously doubt its anywhere near that high, i've seen some developers posts other places that claimed there piracy rate was in the high 80 percentage.
most look at the downloads and purchases and say hmm i sold 2 but it was downloaded 10 times.. what they fail to realize is that i can buy a game and download from apple to any device i own. i often will download it to my main pc from itunes, then go to my wife's and download it to her pc from itunes, then download it to my development mac system. why because its good to backup stuff
i don't trust the cloud crap to store stuff, its so knew and have already experienced lost files. .. but anyways, she has a iphone, i have a iphone she has a ipad 2, i have a ipad 2, and a ipad 1, 2 of our 4 kids have ipod touches, so if it was downloaded for every single device, thats 10 downloads for 1 purchase... i mean its convenient to download who wants to sync all those devices?? that would be a but whipping. but lets say at the very least someone buys it from their phone then at some point downloads it via itunes to their pc. i think that that is very common, since even a non power user in family members like mom, aunt uncle cousins commonly do this. at the very least people would see 1/1
as for the ones claiming through code they have signups. well whats to stop the same scenario i can buy once, then all 4 of my kids can make there own account, as well as the wife and i so you get 6 signups on one purchase, since we only have one account in our family.. people forget about this kind of stuff and just assume there game was pirated, i know pirating happens, but unless your game is good, it wont be pirated much anyways, and if it is that good, your still going to sell a but load anyways...
though on the other side i always see people complaining its high and how they have code to detect if the phones jailbroke or not,, so usually curiosity gets the best of me so i may buy the game, and id say 9 out of 10 times, the game is so jr, i seriously doubt they have the programming skills to do what they suggest. why would i say that because 9 out of 10 just launching em and playing them for a few minutes while plugged into the mac, from the iphone config utility on the console screen and through xcodes organizer, you can see so many mem leaks it makes your head hurt that apple allows that on their store.. theres no way a seasoned developer who would have the know how to detect if it was jailbroke or not would have so many mem leaks and as many crashes as the 9 out of 10 ones ive tested. but not all are that bad, some seem well programmed from the mem leak and crash prevention point of view..
apple knows that most of the games do have huge memory leaks, hence why xcode with ios5 will attempt to cure the bad programmers issues. by trying to release the memory for them...
but anyways,, now my speal is over ;0 i doubt most games get anywhere near even 20 percent pirated ratio, and believe the most popular games may possibly get ~50ish percent, but don't think it is much higher otherwise they wouldn't still be on the charts at top week after week after week, for months on end.
Cheers,
Deion G.
