Piracy

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ampos

Quote from: Leginus on 2011-Jan-24
And how have you seen those eh  :whistle:

Just for scientific research, of course!  :nana:
check my web and/or my blog :D
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I own PC-Win, MacBook 13", iPhone 3G/3GS/4G and iPAC-WinCE

Moru

The problem of making an app work less good if it's a pirated version is that the cracker won't get a bad name but you will get very bad reputation. This has killed big commercial games already, don't fall in this trap. Very big companies with extremely well-liked games might get away with this...

Moebius

Perhaps just adding unobtrusive ads or something to get money out of cracked versions would be a good idea...  Moru's point is a good one.
On one thing from the last page:
QuoteIf the iPhone is Jailbroked (recently sentenced as legal in the US) the apps can write to the app folder.  But it does not mean that the app itself has been pirated.
Could it be possible to check if the phone is jailbroken with a file-writing test, and then if it is hash check the executable or code signing files?
For some reason I think it would be nice to be able to at least keep track of the number of cracked apps that are being used if one can't do anything to limit the program without inviting further cracking :(
Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless.
Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop.
- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary

matchy

Quote from: ampos on 2011-Jan-24
Just for scientific research, of course!  :nana:
That's even worse because you are assisting the problem. Sound like double standards?

"Educational" research would be more appropriate because we will NEVER solve this issue.

BdR

#79
*kicks thread*

Yesterday, I decided to write to some Chinese review sites. Using google-translate managed to read (more or less) some pages and sent an e-mail to these 3 sites. gameape, 178.com, zhangxin. Learning from my previous app (see earlier in this thread), I had build a function into the app that it sends a one-time message to my database at the first app startup, to see how many users I've really got (apart from appstore sales figures).

So this morning, starting from about 9:00am I saw many many first-time app starts from Chinese users. I was immediately suspicious because it was *only* from the full version, none from the lite version. The 178.com website had some reviews and seems to have an official link to gameloft so I figured it was legit. But apparently it is affiliated with appifan, which is a jailbreak site. So now a pirated copy of Snake Slider can be downloaded from the appifan site.  :rant: damnit!

I'm not too mad, because you can always kind of expect it.. however this did give me another counter-piracy idea, which is: let the v1.0 of your app be pirated on purpose, and then start adding features (and bugfixes) into your app. This is kind of what the creators of No Time To Explain have done.

Btw my function also checks if the app folder is writable and reports this in the one-time message. Of the chinese users there were about 35% not writable and 65% writable. So when the appfolder is writable that doesn't automatically mean it's not a jailbreak.

spacefractal

piracy is annoyting, but nothing you 100% can due and sometimes drm can been too rouch (read Ubisoft). Howover I have missed this thread in some time, but I see they have added a /_RickRossBoss.  (I have not downloaded the file for just checking the content).

So me gonna think its mightbeen possible to count number of added files to the main root folder, which should not been altered? Th

Also only checking with the signer is a nogo, since its easy to workaround, but could been doing credits as well "crack" string (using crypt$) checks could been done? this should of course not been done under startup, but doing other places. elsewise its would been easy to crack that if anything done on startup.
Genius.Greedy Mouse - Karma Miwa - Spot Race - CatchOut - PowerUp Elevation - The beagle Jam - Cave Heroes 2023 - https://spacefractal.itch.io/

BdR

Counting the number of files won't help, because in the Snake Slider ipa no files were added.

And I'll just leave it at this, but I'll remember this site as a jailbreak site for the next time. Because I like the idea of letting the app be cracked on purpose.

The first version of my new app will probably contain some "bugs" that only happen after a certain date (like save-game not working, screwed up graphics or worse...). I'll make sure it gets pirated and the file spreads, and then normal paying customers will just get an update 8) heh heh

BdR

@Ocean:
After browsing some startup/sale data I realise that not everybody updates their apps as frequently as I would like. Of course I don't expect everybody to update every app the very day it is released. But I've seen evidence of old versions of my app being used (legit so not hacks) even months after a new release.

So you're right.. Building in some sort of app-crippler function that is triggered by a date (implicitly expecting that all paying users are using a newer version by then) might not be such a good idea.

Leginus

This would be a looong job if you had say 250,000 legit users

Leginus

i will see if i can find the link, but i recently read the link where a developer used humour against the pirates.  Basically if it detected a pirate version, the skins on the characters turned to pirates instead of proper characters.

BdR

If I had 250.000 paying users I wouldn't care about piracy :D and I think the app with the characters turned into pirates was "No Time To Explain" (see my post)

Leginus

Lol.  I knew I had read it somewhere  :-[
Note to self...read previous posts

I suppose its a fair point on the 250,000 users.
I think the best way to defeat the piracy issue which has been going on since the c64 and before,  is to forget about it, many people have tried and failed.
Its just one of those things.  It will happen no matter what you do.

Just make sure you have plenty of marketing in your game and hope it spreads the word to people who have better morals and may want to buy it