jrtb

Following up with the iPhone Pirate

Here is an update for everyone on Whack ‘em All and the rest of the conversation I had with the pirate.

To date, we have had ~750 sales and have ~1500 users of Whack ‘em All. That means that 50% of our users are playing pirated versions of the game. We have averaged about 20 downloads per day since the pirating story broke. Prior to that, we were averaging about 10 downloads per day.

We released the free version of Whack ‘em All yesterday in response to all the great feedback we got from everyone. We feel that 90% of the concerns raised on both sides of the piracy issue will be addressed with this new, free version. We’re using advertisements in the free version by AdMob to fund future development and are hopeful this will offset the loss of revenue created by offering the game for free instead of 99 cents.

We also received the following response from Apple on January 15th:

“Please know we have escalated your query to our internal teams for review.”

Here is the rest of the conversation I had with most_uniQue (the developer/cracker/pirate who originally pirated Whack ‘em All).

James:

I just thought you might like to know that after all the feedback we’ve gotten from you and all the others, we’re going to be releasing a free version of our game (fully functional) with ads hopefully next week. Hopefully the ads will work in Cydia. It’s been a crazy week for us! Is there anything you’d like to say if I do a
follow up blog post?

most_uniQue:

People love to hate me ^^ But that just means they don’t understand.
I’m glad you try to work things out properly and i hope you get good revenue from your ads.
But the thing we all would like to know did this adventure boost the sale of Whack’em All?

James:

It did! But not by much We had about 180 sales before this adventure and have about 500 now. We also got about $75 in donations.

There are a bunch of people that are curious if you were contacted by Apple, lawyers or the Man in general because of this. I didn’t set anyone after you, but am curious as well if there has been any response because of this other than from pissed off developers. I’m finding it hard to believe that Apple hasn’t addressed this at all, even with all of the press its getting..

CNET front page today: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10142318-83.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

most_uniQue:

I hope Apple handles this the right way and fixes THEIR problem. Forcing people to buy blindly/without testing is the crime here. And well i wouldn’t be suprised if Apple would send me an email but i really don’t think it should say anything else than “Thank you for bringing this problem better to our attention and now we have realized to fix it” ;D

But if you look at this more closely you’ll see that i’m actually not a threath to Apple anyway. I’ve cracked 35 apps and there are tens of people who still crack and have cracked a lot more than i have. Also what i’ve heard App Store is a goldmine for Apple. So piracy doesn’t seem to hurt them financelly. Cracking $.99 game doesn’t hurt them at all compared to bigger software piratism. One thing is also that the person who created Crackulous was exposed and not even a developer has contacted him.

So Apple coming after me would be just to bury the press i am getting. To silence me. To bury the thruth and their promlems.

I hope you mention at first on your post that this adventure did in fact boost your sales. Also try to mention how many news sites this issue hit. And i do hope Apple will release a press release regarding this matter. Hopefully it’s not ‘most_uniQue wanted dead or alive’

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January 21st, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Comments (3)

Free version of Whack ‘em All now available!

After all the wonderful feedback we’ve gotten recently, we’re very pleased to announce the release of the free version of Whack ‘em All! We’re also very pleased to announce that we have been accepted into the AdMob Developer Program. Funding for future games will come from users clicking on the ads in the free version of our game in combination with those that decide to buy the ad-free 99 cent version of Whack ‘em All.

For more information, see the official press release.

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January 21st, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Leave a comment

A conversation with an iPhone pirate

Awhile back, my wife and I decided it would be a great idea to develop an iPhone and iPod touch game. We’d read a few articles and thought we could certainly use an extra $250,000 So, in our spare time, we developed Whack ‘em All. Whack ‘em All is based on Whack a Mole and is a fun little game available for 99 cents on the iTunes App Store. We spent about 250 hours developing the game and released it to the world on Christmas Eve last year.

How has it done? After two full weeks for sale, we have 811 users. Not bad right? Well, only 196 of them paid for it On January 1st, our app hit http://appulo.us and other assorted pirate and torrent sites. Turns out the pirating community for iPhone is very much alive and well.

Who are these pirates? How do they do it? Read on!

What follows is my conversation with the pirate/cracker/developer who cracked our game and made it available for free. Enjoy!

*******************************************************************************
From: myself (me@jrtb.com)
To: most_uniQue@hotmail.com

Hey

I’m the developer for Whack ‘em All I noticed you’re being given credit for cracking Whack ‘em All and making it generally available for free.

We (just my wife and I) haven’t even made enough money off of this to pay for the iPhone we had to buy to develop it on Just yesterday 40 times more people got your version of the app than bought it off the app store!

I’ve asked some of the sites if they would be willing to take your version of the app offline so that we can make enough money on the app to cover our costs.

I’m curious though why you’re doing this? Would it help if our game were free and we had banner ads?

Thanks!

James

James and Connie Bossert
fairladymedia.com
Reply

*******************************************************************************
Reply from: most_uniQue@hotmail.com

As many iPhone and iPod touch owners have discovered, Apple’s iTunes App Store has many flaws which render it useless to the common user. Apple has chosen to allow a multitude of ridiculous, worthless, poorly-represented applications through its “strict” screening process, nearly all written by mediocre programmers with a dream of getting rich quick. Many of these programmers game the reviews system, misrepresent their application in the description, and generally try to swindle the honest buyer. Applications generally do not cost much, but small fees add up. The iPhone/iPod community has wasted so much money on these programs, an epidemic has taken hold where people have simply stopped buying apps they aren’t certain of so they don’t find themselves purchasing yet another waste of a program.

Apple could quite easily solve this problem by implementing a sort of trial period for each application, but they do not. The user is forced to buy blindly without ever getting to try the application first. Appulo.us is a collection of links to allow iPhone and iPod touch users the ability to try out full, unlimited versions of device software before making the decision to buy it.

You cannot accuse me for those 40 people because all of them would have NOT purchased your application anyway. And as said above i only want to give public the change to try out your game before spending their money. I at first did not crack any games but after i purchased a few games which were not as good as the description let me believe i wanted to help others not to waste their money on something which even has no return policy. To solve this problem either talk to Apple to allow trials or as you said, you can release your game on Cydia with ads.

Future emails/responses to /dev/null.

*******************************************************************************
Reply from: myself (me@jrtb.com)

Just in case you’re still checking

I appreciate the response! I’m happy about all the exposure the cracked copy of the game is generating for us. Hopefully that will translate into enough earnings for us to be able to develop another game Pirating is a fact of life these days and I appreciate that if it wasn’t you it would have been someone else

A couple of quick questions would really help me understand more about this and hopefully improve the quality of games and apps on the app store:

Could you point me to some resources to be able to understand how you cracked the game? I’d love to understand more about it!

Do you crack just any app (like from a list someone gives you), or do you only crack apps that you’d like to play?

I’m thinking about publishing a story about this on my blog. If there is anything you would like the public at large to know, let me know and I’ll pass it on

Thanks!

James

*******************************************************************************
Reply from: most_uniQue@hotmail.com

Thousands and thousands of new people saw your app on Appulous so i hope that got your app more publicity. When i crack an app, any app, i do not do it to hurt developers. Without you we wouldn’t even have our community =) I do this so people would know is an app worth their money.

Now before i answer your questions i’d like to know where did you get my email if not from Hackulous? Because im sure you have heard of Hackulous and therefore visited it so you should know these already… But anyway

I use Crackulous. It is an “one-tap” cracking software developed by Hackulous but only available for Beta testers and Staff. (No, you cannot become a beta tester But if you check our Tutorials section you’ll find a guide “Cracking Apps With xCrack”. xCrack is version 0.1 of Crackulous which has now been developed to version 0.9b. We are planning on releasing Crackulous to the public when it hits 1.0 but i cannot give any date for it.

At first i cracked the ones i had on my iPhone but i didn’t have many so i looked our Requests section to see which apps are wanted and cracked 30 of them. But i never even liked the idea of being a cracker so i cracked total of 35 apps and now i’ve “retired” From 35 apps i got just about 3-4 thanks… (You can find most_uniQue’s Cracked Apps from our Releases section)

So in the future i’m only going to continue being a moderator on Hackulous and helping others with their problems because that’s what i like to do and that’s why i joined Hackulous in the first place.

And i don’t know but is it allowed to release your games on e.g. Cydia with ads? Because that would be a huge benefit for you.

Visit Hackulous and take a look around: http://hackulo.us/ And why not to introduce yourself to the community at our Introductions section.

PS: You can add me as your friend at hackulous if you want

*******************************************************************************
Reply from: myself (me@jrtb.com)

I got your email by googling “most_uniQue”

Thanks for the tips on Crackulous! I’ll have to check that out. We’ll be looking into a free version with ads soon, I would assume the ads would still work even with Cydia, we’ll find out! I’m going to post this on my blog today, so perhaps you’ll get some props there

For more on this story, check the comments in my previous post about this and the comments on this post below. Thanks!

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January 5th, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Comments (114)

We’ve got pirates!

Hey everyone

First off, we use PinchMedia to track usage on our new game for iPhone and iPod touch, Whack ‘em All. PinchMedia is a fantastic product and has been really great for us to use to track all kinds of metrics related to our app’s usage. They’ve got detailed reports for how many people use your app, for how long, where they’re from, how many crashes they have, etc. It’s also really easy to include in your app. They’ve got great instructions on their site.

Anyway, our download numbers remain about 10 per day even with all of the advertising we’re trying. Well, yesterday our PinchMedia numbers show 400+ new users! We were really excited! Turns out this morning that we only had 12 actual sales (as reported by iTunes Connect on the Apple site). Bummer!!! So, if 400 people are playing and only 12 people paid, something must be up right?

The great guys at PinchMedia, Greg and Jesse (co-founders, CEO and Lead Developer) were gracious enough to troubleshoot the data and found the location of a pirate site letting people download our game for free. So, yesterday, 40 times as many people stole our game than paid for it

You have to look at the bright side here, and that is that there is demand for the game

I’ve sent the folks at the pirate site a letter letting them know who we are and asking them to remove the files, we’ll see what happens

If anyone is interested in tracking down more sites that have our game for free, please do what you can and let me know. I’m willing to provide free (legit) downloads of our game and would be willing to discus other means of compensation

Thanks!

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January 3rd, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Comments (16)

December Stock results

Hah! What stock results? J/K, Happy New Year everyone! 2009!!!

Here are my numbers from lookstat (still awesome!):

$29 from the big 3 and about $10 from the rest (not shown). We went on a marathon vacation up and down the east coast and the Bahamas this month, so as soon as I’ve got time to process and upload the new pictures, these numbers should go up.

Also, now that Whack ‘em All has been released for iPhone and iPod touch, I may have some free time to shoot in the studio!

Great shooting everyone!

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January 1st, 2009 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Comments (3)

Our AdMob experience

So AdMob is the leading iPhone and iPod touch advertising company (according to them). Check them out here.

We’re trying pretty much everything we can think of to promote and advertise Whack ‘em All, our new game for iPhone and iPod touch. If you haven’t seen it, check it out here.

I decided to run $50 worth of banner ads through AdMob targeted specifically at iPhone users. That is, on apps like Tap Defense, users would see a banner ad for Whack ‘em All. When they click on it, it sends them directly to the App Store page for our game. The banner ad said “The best .99 iPhone game!” (you’re limited to 35 characters).

Results? The ad was approved yesterday at 7:56pm. The $50 ran out exactly 9 minutes later During that time, they showed our ad 22,727 times (hard to believe?). 500 people clicked on the ad for a click through rate of 2.2%. 16 people downloaded the game yesterday, up from 11 the day before. My impression? Waste of money If I were going to do this again (and I don’t think I will), I would use a title with Whack ‘em All in it, or perhaps, “like Whack a Mole?”.

Have you used AdMob? You’re impressions? Other ideas? Please let me know!
Thanks!

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January 1st, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Comments (6)

122 downloads of Whack ‘em All and counting! ;)

That would be a revenue of $85.40! That’s for the 24th – 30th, our first full week in release. Certainly not stellar numbers, but not bad considering that the app wasn’t listed on the New section in the App Store and we haven’t promoted the app heavily.

For those interested in the details… We’ve got about 250 hours invested in the game’s creation, with about 100 in graphics and 150 in coding. We’ve also got $140 invested for royalty free music and another $200 for an iPhone. So to break even for our investment, we would need to get another 364 downloads. To cover our time spent developing the app, we would need to get another 28,571 downloads on top of the 364

I’ve contacted Apple about getting listed in the New section and will be considering other methods of advertising the game over the next week or two. Please let me know if you have any ideas!

Thanks to everyone for your downloads and great reviews! So far, we’ve got 5 reviews averaging 5 stars!

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December 30th, 2008 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Leave a comment

Whack ‘em All! Released!!

Hey everyone, Connie and I released our first iPhone and iPod touch game!! It’s called Whack ‘em All! And you can find out more about it on it’s website at: http://whackemall.com

Try it out and give it a great review if you like it!

Thanks and Merry Christmas everyone!!!

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December 25th, 2008 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Comments (4)

November stock numbers

This month, in honor of the fantastic lookstat.com beta release, I’ll be using screenshots directly from lookstat for my stats. Talk about saving time! Thanks lookstat!!!

As you can see, it was a horrible month for me. I’ve been concentrating on other things recently and didn’t add any new images last month for the first month since I started. But having about a 50% drop off probably can’t be written off by just my lack of uploading. Clearly there is less demand for the images currently in my portfolio. Is that because of the economy? Hard to say!

We’re going on a cruise to the Bahamas this month, so I should have plenty of new images!

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December 2nd, 2008 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Comments (8)

October stock numbers

What a spooky month!

BMEs at Dreamstime and Fotolia. In particular, I made more at Dreamstime this month than iStock! First time that’s ever happened. But with the slump at iStock continuing, it isn’t surprising that sales are higher elsewhere.

Total revenue this month was $92 on the back of an average of 9 new photos accepted (5% increase in portfolio). The new batch did particularly well at Shutterstock. Not a great month, I blame the economy!

agency	earnings	photos	RPI	STR
istockphoto	$21	177	$0.12	46%
shutterstock	$32	169	$0.19	79%
dreamstime	$22	201	$0.11	24%
fotolia	$5	152	$0.03	16%
123rf	$5	272	$0.02	10%
bigstockphoto	$7	233	$0.03	12%
	$92		$0.08	31%

Also, I can’t say enough about how great BigStockPhoto has been for me the last couple of months! I had a conversation this month by email with BSP’s founder, Tim Donahue. He had personally contacted me to clear an EL sale and mentioned how great my portfolio looked I had to thank him for the time to personally contact me and the complement by returning the favor! Thanks Tim!!

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November 3rd, 2008 | Category: General | Comments (4)

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