iPhone Developer: 80% of Their Downloads are from Illegal Piracy
Apple believes their iPhone is the future of the gaming handheld market. It just might be, I mean look at it, it’s powerful, a phone and even could be considered a mini-computer. But one thing the company needs to address before anyone can give them the crown for the king of portable gaming — piracy. According to an iPhone developer, Smells Like Donkey, almost 80 percent of all the downloads for Tap-Fu have been illegally downloaded. The sad thing is the game isn’t even expensive. Right now, if you head over to the Apple’s app-store, you’ll find the game only to be the cheap price of $1.99. But that hasn’t stopped people from getting the game for nothing.
This is sad and terrible news for the gaming industry. One of the great things the iPhone has done for the industry over the last year or so, is giving the designers the chance to create their own idea for a title. Believe it or not, making an independent game was both hard and financially a huge risk. But thanks to devices like the iPhone, anyone who has decent knowledge on programing and has the time, can actually make a title for the fraction of what it used to be.
If piracy becomes more of an issue and Apple doesn’t fix it, we’ll see less and less of these entrepreneur take the risk — which in turn means less original games.
