Shadowgun saw worse piracy rates than Dead Trigger on Android

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Published on Tuesday, 21 August 2012 12:00

Ah yes, the topic of piracy has once again come up and once again Madfinger Games has released some interesting information to consider. Everyone knows that Dead Trigger went free-to-play due to the piracy rate being high for it, almost 80% to be exact. What a lot of people don't know is that Shadowgun had worse piracy.

To us, piracy is a general contemporary problem. It is so easy to get a pirated copy everywhere for free that people don't even think about buying it. This is the norm nowadays. It's normal not to pay for anything you can have for free and nobody cares. All developers are tackling this problem, and so we are. - Anna Porizkova, Madfinger Games

When Shadowgun was released it had a 90% piracy rate according to Madfinger Games. However, they don't really blame the android ecosystem or Google Play. This is probably due to the fact that piracy is just as bad on iOS a lot of the time as it is on Android. They go on to say that one shouldn't give Android the cold shoulder when planning to release a game simply because of the piracy news surrounding it as the problem is a contemporary one and not so much an Android one.

Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other. The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier.

As to Madfinger Games' future titles will also be free-to-play to help combat the whole piracy issue, they are not sure just yet. For now they are just going to see how it goes with their current titles and make their decision based upon that, regardless of how popular that business model is these day.

Website Referenced: Gamasutra

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