The huge success of an AppStore failure
GAMEized generally develops branded games and entertainment applications for other companies, but they’ve recently taken the bold step of self-promotion by developing a game for themselves. After hundreds of hours of research and development, a new football / soccer arcade game was born, and it’s called FingerKicks.
In its first few days after release, FingerKicks amassed over 17,000 players and the numbers were soaring daily. With that many players at 99¢ each in under a week, one would think that FingerKicks would be a runaway hit and a welcome financial windfall for its developers.
Dave Rosen, the founder of GAMEized, reported, “We submitted the game to Apple and four days later the game was approved and submitted for sale worldwide. Our hearts started racing desperately to know how the game was doing in the stores but Apple only provides data once a day. Waiting (and sneak-peaking the stores) was the only way to monitor the activity.”
The first day’s results were low but promising: 144 purchases for a profit of $97.35. Even more encouraging, FingerKicks reached the Top 10 in Portugal, where football is the #1 spectator sport. The second day’s results were a little lower, only 115 purchases, but it was a Saturday and all hopes were pinned on Sunday’s sales. It didn’t disappoint – the numbers climbed back up to a respectable 122 purchases.
On the following Monday there were over 200 FingerKicks players listed on Apple’s Game Center leaderboards, and it was clear the buzz about the game was out and spreading. By Tuesday morning, the player numbers had climbed to 2,200, then to 3,000 – then to 4,000 and eventually reached as high as 5,000 players.
Because Apple only provides app sales data once per day, GAMEized used the Game Center leaderboards as a barometer for how many players had purchased FingerKicks. It was reasonable to conclude that 5,000 players meant at least 5,000 sales, and since many customers don’t use Game Center, the actual sales numbers might have been much higher.
It was a bitter disappointment when GAMEized discovered that the Game Center numbers weren’t reflected in the iTunesConnect purchase reports. In fact, iTC reported only 160 purchases – a substantially lower number than the number of people actually playing the game. How it that possible?
That’s when it became clear just how expansive the underground world of app piracy was… and still is.
When someone jailbreaks an iPhone they can use applications such as Installous to install pirated apps. Luis Fonseca, the lead developer for FingerKicks, said, “We've always known about iPhone jailbreaking and of people who'd rather steal than pay for someone's hard work, but we had no idea the extent of this problem and the sheer volume of people who willingly crack existing apps just to save – or steal - 99¢.”
To its credit (and to its detriment), FingerKicks made first page on Installous, the hackers AppStore; the game’s popularity was skyrocketing but the losses from piracy were mounting. As of this writing, FingerKicks has sold only 1163 legitimate copies but there are at least 15,950 pirated copies being played on a regular basis on Apple’s Game Center. That equates to an astonishing 91% of downloads that are pirated.
Most bewildering of all is that even with all their rhetoric chastising piracy and intellectual property theft, Apple apparently has no functional counter-piracy safeguards in place on their Game Center – essentially permitting users to play pirated software on their Game Center without any fear of reprisals or consequence.For the record: GAMEized loves Apple. As application developers, GAMEized invests wholeheartedly in Apple’s tools and methodologies. The agency buys and uses Apple’s machines, their peripherals and their accessories almost exclusively. When GAMEized decided to build FingerKicks, it was a foregone conclusion the game would be available exclusively on the iOS and available only through Apple’s AppStore.
Apple has yet to reciprocate the same devotion GAMEized has shown.
Recent events have proven that no company in the world can achieve 100% security against intrusion or piracy, and GAMEized is sympathetic to their plight. However, it’s reasonable to assume that many if not most of the 17,000 users playing FingerKicks on Apple’s Game Center probably wouldn’t be playing a pirated version if it weren’t so readily available and so openly accepted by Apple.
Maybe Apple has tried and failed to take down Installous, or maybe they’re completely powerless to stop them. In either case, until Apple fully embraces the issue and supports their vendors and suppliers, we will be forced to reevaluate our plans for other iOS games until Apple fixes this humiliating piracy problem.
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