Op-Ed: Android Piracy Is Huge Problem for Game Devs

This is a Wired UK guest post by Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, the developers of the Football Manager games series. You can follow him on Twitter at @milessi.

Last week I found myself in one of those “good news, bad news” situations. The good was that more than 100,000 people were enjoying the new Android version of our game. The bad news was that only about 10 percent of them paid for it.

Ever since we unveiled the iOS version of Football Manager Handheld, I’ve had regular Twitter inquiries about an Android version. This was to be expected; we have an award-winning app which had sold very well on iTunes, despite being at a premium price point of £6.99 (about $11.33) — something which, for licensing reasons, we don’t have a great deal of control over, but that’s a story for another day.

We thought long and hard about making the move to Android, as there were many issues which needed addressing. The biggest challenge was the variety of handsets available and the consequent variety of screen resolutions we would have to support, but also commercial considerations: the usability of the Google Play store, the lack of possibilities for us on the Amazon store (we sell most of our games in Europe where the later Kindle devices aren’t yet available) and fragmentation in the market.

Despite all these issues, we want to entertain as many people as possible with our games, and the requests showed that there was a market waiting for us to release. So after some successful experimental development, we released our Android game a couple of weeks ago. It went straight into the top 20 in many European countries, both in the “paid app” and “top grossing” charts, and a 4.4/5 rating. Which sounds like a pretty good start, right?

Because of the fragmentation, we created a handful of “skins” for the game to cover the majority of device resolutions. Once a player has installed the game on his phone, the handset senses which resolution the phone can handle and downloads the appropriate skin.

The publicly available sales figures on Google Play are broken up into bands; 500-1,000, 5,000-10,000 … you get the idea. Football Manager Handheld crossed into the 10,000-50,000 band a week after release. This isn’t spectacular — the iOS version reached that milestone on its first day — but it was where we expected to be, based on the stats we’d seen from other developers.

As our sales passed the 10,000 mark, I asked to see the figure for skin downloads; it was up to 113,000. Because every installed copy of the game — legitimately bought or not — needs a skin, we were able to make a pretty direct comparison between our sales figures and our actual user base.

I like to believe the best in people, so I imagined to myself that everyone who bought our game downloaded it twice; once for their phone and once for their tablet. Even if this were true, that still means a piracy rate of 83 percent. But it’s not true — the majority of people who bought it downloaded it once, the rest downloaded it illegally. [Jacobson told Eurogamer that the piracy rate for Football Manager 2009 up until mid-March -- the only 100 percent verified statistics the team has had -- was 5:1.]

I tweeted about this 9:1 piracy ratio, calling those that had bombarded us with requests for the game and then pirated it “dicks.” I make no apology for this. Anyone who illegally downloads software is a dick.

My tweet was picked up by a few news outlets, and I watched the comments sections with interest. Most comments were from people shocked at how high the ratio was, but there was also a handful of piracy apologists claiming that the game is too expensive (which is no excuse for illegal downloading … games are entertainment, not a human right), that it’s not available in some countries (for legal reasons out of our hands), that the game should be free to play (not possible with our current licensing arrangements) and the argument that we don’t lose anything from piracy, so what does it matter?

Piracy is a fact of life for game developers. I’m not stupid enough to think that 100 percent of pirated games are lost sales — there are, of course, some people who would not buy or play a game if it wasn’t available for free, but there are also some dishonest people who pirate things they would otherwise buy, just because they can.

The thing is, people who make games do lose from piracy. We lose from the small percent of pirated copies that are lost sales, but we also have direct costs, both financial and opportunity costs, which can be attributed to every version, pirated or not. Whether that be server costs (for skin downloads), support costs (believe it or not, pirates still ask for customer support) and wasted time trying to deal with it all.

So what do we do? We can look into going “free to play,” which will lead to huge costs having to attempt to renegotiate all of our licenses, and would only take one to say “no” to make it impossible. We could badger Google into doing something with its store and the Android operating system to make it harder for the pirates but, to be frank, that would be too little too late. We could write a DRM system to make it harder, or look to license one in and integrate it.

All of which costs time that we’d rather be spending improving the game.

What we really need for Android is an online shop front that doesn’t just make it easy for people to buy and access their games, but also offers services such as leaderboards (think global high score tables) and community features, alongside some customer-friendly DRM. A system that doubles up as a way to “matchmake” network gamers, so you can play against your friends. An online store that essentially acts like an app-only iTunes, Game Center and a social network for Android users all in one.

On PC and Mac there was a great innovation a few years back built by Gabe Newell and his team at Valve which does all of those things. It’s called Steam. Something like Steam on Android could revolutionize the market for all — we’re at a time where developers and publishers are turning their back on Android due to all the problems the market has, rather than embracing it.

I wonder if Gabe Newell reads Wired?