Gamized is an iOS game development company that has launched 2 weeks ago in the App Store a game called Fingerkicks. The game is not spectacular, but it is "addictive" and successful if we consider that more than 17.000 people have already installed it in their own terminal. The developers would have expected to earn no less than £12.000 from the game Fingerkicks but in reality they managed to obtain only £800 after only 1,163 copies were sold through the App Store.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we've collected less than $800 in sales for FingerKicks, and Apple's policies (or lack thereof) are the primary reason for the huge losses. It was a bitter disappointment when we discovered that the Game Center numbers weren't reflected in the iTunesConnect purchase reports," writes Fonseca. "In fact, iTC reported only 160 purchases - a substantially lower number than the number of people actually playing the game. How is that possible?
Using Game Center they saw how many players actually recorded their scores, but in reality the number of people who installed FingerKicks can be much higher considering that not everyone uses Game Center. Developers have lost 90% of the possible profit generated by Fingerkicks because of those who hack applications and for a developer it is really hard to bear the fact that your application is so popular but you do not earn anything from its development. Those from Gamized blame the policies of the Apple company, which does not do enough to stop piracy, but no matter what Apple does, users will still be able to hack applications, especially since now this can be done even without a jailbreak.
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 allowing users to play pirated software on their Game Center without any fear of reprisals or consequences. 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 re-evaluate our plans for other iOS games until Apple fixes this humiliating piracy problem.
For those who hack, the problem is simple, get the application from where you can, install it and enjoy it. For developers, the situation is complicated because without that money they have nothing to eat, they have nothing to pay their debts with and they will no longer provide support for applications or will no longer make others. In countries like Romania, being an application developer is not a job from which you can get great benefits unless you are hired for projects, otherwise you occupy your time making applications for which many people will not pay.
All this problem will have a finality one day, but it is necessary for Apple to be subjected to some pressure from big application developers, otherwise nothing will change.
