Open letter to software pirates: Please review our games.

Today we've discovered that our debut title Damian Filigree: the Book of Thoth was available on several iPhone/iPod pirating sites.

Software has been pirated for as long as I can remember. I'm from the MSX / ZX-Spectrum generation, and I too had lots of pirated games. Frankly, I didn't even know where to get the games, and the disks were mostly included when you bought the machine. I've never believed in annoying copy-protection some games do. It only annoys the legitimate user. With the rise of internet and SAAS / game subscriptions etc, developers have a strategically better position. However, having 5 subscriptions can add up, especially if you are the one paying for a few children. The answer to this is of course the freemium model, with or without ads.

Not everybody understands that it takes a lot of time, effort and money to produce an entertainment product. The devil is in the details, and polishing the game can take a large sum of the budget. When it's all done, you get a feeling of accomplishment and you will have to convince people to buy your game.

To do this, you will first have to get noticed. With the zillion games available today, it's getting more and more difficult to stand out. It's a difficult task that can be done; we've seen as much as 1000 downloads per hour for 24 hours while we were featured by OpenFeint. After this comes the toughest job:

Getting people to spend money on your product.

I've always been a firm believer that price doesn't matter, as long as it's reasonable. Even if we would sell Damian Filigree: the Book of Thoth for $0.01, I don't think that would increase sales even by 200%. This statement is based entirely on gut feeling. There's a threshold to spend money. The App Store has made this bump in the road a lot more smooth, but the bump still exists.

Here come the pirates. Pirating is done for the sake of it. Besides that, some people are unable to buy anything on the App Store, most likely because they have no credit-card. I tend to see pirating as a piece of viral marketing, and would like to ask all pirates / torrent-sites:

If you happen to pirate our games, or link to pirated versions of our games, PLEASE write a review about it.

By doing this, you are adding value for the developers. We understand that pirating will not go away, but try to write something about the game. You'll probably see that even writing a simple review takes a lot of time. Now, hold that thought and think about the effort it takes to create the game.

Joris Verschoor