From the Weekend: Android isn't the only one to suffer from piracy; Yonghz emulators for free

Two stories that came out this weekend, actually late Friday, are pretty interesting. The first is about an iOS developer who saw a staggering 91% piracy rate for their game on the App Store. This shows that Android isn't the only one that suffers from piracy. The second story is about Yonghz and his emulators which were pulled off the market.

So sit back, enjoy your lunch and onto the stories!

A developer by the name of GAMEized had recently released a game onto the App Store called FingerKicks which is a football game. According to the developer, the first few days saw some pretty decent sales, roughly over 100 each day across a weekend's time. Unfortunately, the way the App Store works, developers can't really see stats for their sales until the following day. A lot of developers use the Game Center leaderboards as a sort of Barometer to judge the activity and users on their games since Apple only provides this data once a day at the day's end.

What the developers saw was pretty amazing and not in a good way. When PocketGamer wrote about this, GAMEized has sold 1163 copies while there happen to be 15,950 regular players. This means that GAMEized's FingerKicks game had a piracy rate of 91%. Keep in mind though that just because someone pirated a copy of a game doesn't mean that person would have bought the game if pirating it wasn't possible. Still, that is an incredibly high number of pirated copies.

Unfortunately, the Game Center won't stop the ability to play pirated games so when someone pirates a copy of a game, such a FingerKicks, they can still access all the Game Center features. While the media generally likes to point at Android as a haven for piracy, let it be known that it can happen just as bad, if not worse, on other platforms. You can read the full story over at PocketGamer or see the blog post by the developers over at GAMEized.

The second story is a bit more good news, especially for fans of Yonghz emulators. Not to long ago Yonghz had all of his emulators pulled off the Android Market. His emulators have been some of the most popular ones to date on the Android Market and Yonghz pretty much had an emulator for just about every platform. Well Phandroid is reporting that Yonghz has decided to head over to the SlideMe 3rd party Android Marketplace and upload his emulators there.

As a thanks for everyone's patience along with helping those who already purchased his emulators, he has made all of them, except for the N64 emulator, free for two weeks. If you haven't had a chance yet, head on over to SlideMe and grab a copy of your favorite emulator while you can!