Piracy alert: iPhone game suffers 96 per cent illegal downloads

The Little Tank that Could... get nicked

 Few developers have gone on record about iPhone piracy in the last year, allegedly for fear of drawing attention to an issue Apple would rather suppress, but a few squeaks and leaks have assured us that it's happening.

This latest story gives us some idea about the extent to which it's happening. Developer Abraham Stolk has revealed on his blog that his game The Little Tank that Could, which had sold 45 copies at the time of his writing, has been downloaded illegally more than 1000 times.

It went like this: having believed that his game would be a success, Stolk was disappointed to note that it sold just 20, ten, five, two and eight copies respectively during its first five days on sale. However, when Stolk went to check the online leaderboard server logs for the game he discovered that 1114 players had been logged.

"So how can a game that sold 45 copies, have 1114 players? That does not make any sense? I have no reason to believe that Apple's sales reports are faulty, so the answer is piracy. Very quickly after the release of 'the little tank that could' the game got cracked, and distributed via torrents."

Having established this, Stolk applies the principle to the App Store as a whole. "For every game you sell on the appstore," he says, "there are 24 pirates playing a bootleg copy. Out of 25 people, only one will choose to pay."

This isn't strictly true, of course. Different games are likely to be pirated at different rates depending on the demographics they appeal to and so on. Just yesterday we heard that F.A.S.T has generated more than $1m with 500,000 downloads in just six weeks. If Stolk's equation applies, that means 12.5m people have downloaded the game in total. Unlikely.

This is troubling news for any developer looking to board the iPhone train, but it probably shouldn't discourage anybody from doing so.

Bram's in Canada [via iPhoneWorld]