Pinch Media is claiming that an average of 34% of iPhone app installs are pirated and that the piracy affects 60% of apps in general. A few months ago, the developer modified their analytic software so that apps could identify and report pirate installs. Using the accumulated data, they’ve just posted a slideshow of piracy [...]

Pirates happen. A lot. For the most part, developers and distributers respond to the ever-present threat of theft with DRM and attempts to foster social change. The logic goes that pirates are the enemy and they must be fought and undermined to prevent the swashing of bucklers wherever possible. They can buy your games, so they should be buying them.

Consider the implicit assumption that pirates can buy the games they’re stealing. Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development/legal affairs points out that many of them can’t (via GameDaily):

“The reason people pirated things in Russia, is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’ “

He then went on to detail how Valve has experienced significantly declining piracy when they do simultaneous worldwide releases of fully localized products. Although his anti-piracy plan appears to consist of the radical business strategy of selling products to people who don’t have them, the succinct identification of the western centrism underlying most anti-piracy is a bit revelatory. It’d be interesting to see the geographical breakdown on who stole World of Goo.

Pirates are heroes! Swashbucklers sailing on Nintendo’s Blue Ocean, they stand against unreasonable DRM, price gouging, distributor hegemony, and all that corporate bad stuff. That is, unless you happen to have released a DRM-free, cheap, independant game called World of Goo. In that case, they’re just thieves.

2D Boy (via Twenty-Sided), developers of the excellent tower construction game, have conducted an informal survey that compares the number of sales they’ve made to the number of IP addresses registering scores on their leaderboards. After doing some reasonable stats, they estimate the piracy rate for World of Goo is 82%. Put another way, only 18% of the players are actually paying for their game. The developers admit that it’s a rough estimate, but not an unreasonable one. So maybe most pirates aren’t so romantic as the vocal pirates would have you believe.

On the other hand, if you take from this that DRM is important to protect developers, that’s wrong too. 2D Boy also points out that a DRM-protected game, Ricochet Infinity, actually suffers a piracy rate of 92%. Adding insult to injury is the fact that pirates only rarely convert to paying paying customers. Although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons between different games with different audiences and market awareness, it’s difficult to ignore those numbers.

So if you happen to be a games distributor reading this news/review blog, ask yourself what you’re getting in exchange for the money and consumer goodwill you spend on DRM. On the other side of the fence, if you’ve pirated World of Goo and liked it, show 2D Boy $20 of your love.

Peter Moore, EA Executive and former Microsoft veep has publicly warned against suing your consumers, even if they are pirates. Turning the other cheek, Moore points out that the tactic didn’t work so well for the RIAA, and it won’t work now. It’s like beating up a kid for his lunch money after he threw a spitball at you. You may hurt him in the short term, but overall you only increase his lust for slimy revenge.

Moore’s solution to the problem is, “build game experiences that make it more difficult for there to be any value in pirating games.” Of course, that’s easy for him to say. He currently heads up the EA Sports division, a gaming genre that is definitively multiplayer. Since online multiplayer is tracked by remote servers, the only pirates it doesn’t foil are the ones who can steal or spoof other user accounts. It’s like online activation DRM, but your consumer base wants to use it. Pity single-player gaming developers don’t have something like that.

Or do they? Games are moving online, even single-player games. From achievements to leaderboards to simple chat interfaces, developers can shoehorn an online component into just about anything. If they standardize that component, it’ll hardly take any development resources at all. Humans are social animals–we (usually) like others to know what we’re doing and to share our experiences. Maybe Moore is right, and gaming can leverage that fact to cut down on piracy.

There’s more potentially shoddy journalism regarding video games today. The Sunday Post (via Gamasutra) has an article where John Hillier, a spokesman for the UK Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association’s intellectual property crime unit (ELSPA), is attributed with the estimation that 90% of American DS owners play pirated software. Gamasutra has since posted an addendum to the story; evidently ELSPA later criticized the article for actually consisting of a real conversation, an unrelated news article, and outright fabrications.

While ELSPA would obviously want to discredit the Sunday Post’s article because, “ELSPA would certainly never presume to comment about America,” the article seems suspect all on its own. While there’s a significant incentive for core gamers to pirate games (hey, it’s an expensive hobby and a financially crippling obsession), casual gamers and their low attach rates seem unlikely to make the necessary effort to seek out illicit storage devices and illegal ROMs.