In what seems to be an unintentional response to our previous report surrounding the supposed rampant piracy on Android, another developer believes that the reverse is true. Chris Pruett, a developer for the popular game Wind-up Knight and founder of Robot Invader, said that the company’s piracy rate on the said game was about 12% on Android and about 15% on iOS. Pruett added that back when Wind-up Knight for iOS was a paid app, the piracy rate reportedly went 80%.
The developer also mentioned that roughly 100% of their pirate users on Android and iOS are in China. “I think piracy is, as always, a red herring. You can’t stop it, but as long as it’s slightly arduous, it’s not a lot of lost sales. Because a huge number of people who pirate software would never buy it in a million years,” Pruett explained. “You aren’t losing a sale to them. Piracy starts to matter only when pirate users can cost you money in other ways, e.g. network bandwidth and server cost. Yet another reason to be a free app in today’s mobile marketplace.”