Developer Questions Why Apple Allows Pirated Games on Game Center

GAMEized, the developer behind the iOS game FingerKicks, is speaking out on iOS game piracy and questioning why Apple's Game Center supports pirated apps.

In a post on their blog, GAMEized reveals how excited they were about app sales based on the number of Game Center players, only to find that most were pirated 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 assume 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 we 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?

FingerKicks has now sold 1163 legitimate copies but there are at least 15,950 pirated copies being played regularly 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.

Unfortunately, this type of piracy is commonly associated with jailbreaking because it requires a jailbroken device. Please help reduce this stigma by supporting the developers that work hard to bring you these apps.


You can purchase FingerKicks from the App Store for $0.99.

Read More [via AppleInsider]