[patio11]

Let me condense the conversation for you: Blah blah blah, free marketing, blah blah blah, wouldn't have bought it anyway, blah blah blah, DRM never works.

Then you move your code to the server and this never bothers you again. This defeats piracy so well it works in China.

[nupark2]

This sounds more like a narrative that supports your entrenched position, personal worldview, and target audience, rather than an actual useful summary of the many lucid arguments put forward in the original link.

[mbateman]

I thought it was a useful summary. The arguments in the original link are by-now-familiar platitudes, even if they are lucid.

[trevelyan]

Piracy might not bother him again... until his pirated downloads drop by 98% and paid downloads drop by 50%. And when he complains about this on Hacker News, patio11 tells him to spend more time blogging and working on SEO. ;)

[patio11]

My advice would have the desirable property of actually working.

[trevelyan]

I've personally benefited from your shared insights into SEO here, but your reply above is glib and dismissive of a business strategy that works for a lot of people (including me). It emphasizes actively focusing on SEO and pursuing visibility in search engines instead of passively optimizing for word-of-mouth and visibility in channels like the App store.

So no... I disagree that it would work. I think rkalla below offers some great advice. To which I'd add that if I were this guy, I'd give a basic version of the app away for free to boost legit downloads through the App store, brand the hell out of it (URL on load page), charge other app websites to be featured as the site of the day, and use various methods ("visit our website for a code to unlock extra content") to get user emails and build a distribution channel that he can leverage in the future. This requires a bit of work, but much less (I think) than is required by the non-freemium approach, and has the advantage of avoiding a focus on Google as one's key distribution channel.

[tptacek]

You disagree that serverside software is harder to pirate than clientside software? You're wrong.

I think what's happening here is that you're not following Patrick's advice to the logical conclusion he's trying to lead you to. He's not suggesting that you SEO an existing iOS application. He's suggesting that you hoist the parts of that application that are worth money into a server and require people to have paid accounts on the server.

This has been Patrick's response to (utterly pointless and exasperating) piracy discussions on HN for at least two years now. He's not being glib. He's repeating himself, concisely.

[trevelyan]

tptacek,

This comment is not meant to be dismissive, but your advice is imho a recipe for dismal placement in the App store. It makes it much less likely that anyone will find this guy's application and will produce a bunch of 1-star rankings from those who do because "app didn't work" or "requires Internet" or "why do i have to register on server after buying app". Your proposal for server authentication also risks violating Apple's new TOS regarding subscription apps unless he moves to in-app payments and goes freemium anyway (which is part of the more realistic solution).

There is a non-obvious case to be made that this guy's Asteroids clone should be a paid webapp, but the suggestion is so counterintuitive to actual iOS marketers that summarizing all advice to the contrary as "blah blah blah" is not helpful. And I suspect that if you or Patrick had experience developing for iOS you wouldn't be so quick to believe that any strategy that doesn't involve tethering applications is "pointless and exasperating".

Piracy does not help with pagerank, but total downloads do wonders for visibility in the App Store as do the "others also downloaded" buttons. If Patrick is advising killing that marketing channel, he will need to come up with something else and if it isn't SEO I don't know what it is. This guy needs to leverage his freeloaders to promote the visibility of his stuff and be smarter about providing people with opportunities to pay him. For an example of a better approach look at the strategy of this company. Not only does free promote paid, but the price of the paid app is higher because it doesn't need to compete with other paid games for visibility in general channels:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sillysoft-games/id29253857...

[Roritharr]

Why is success that is generated by some kind of act that is seen as "work" in a way better than success that is generated by the planned use of known forces (online piracy).

I don't want to get all bruce lee, but isn't redirecting some kind of force, be it the interest of pirates or something else, always better than to work against it?

[tptacek]

There are moral judgements to be made about piracy, but I think the larger issue is that the pull-through sales from piracy are, in at least some people's opinions, wishful.

[sgift]

An interesting property of this approach: The app creator _will_ know if "wouldn't have bought it anyway" is true.

The result may be a shock for some, but at least they have no more illusions ("So many people love my app but pirate it. If they couldn't pirate it they would buy it!") and can get back to work.

[mattgreenrocks]

Is there a way to associate a purchase made on the Android/iOS app store with an account on a server?

[aneth]

I agree. Piracy is the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft. If DRM worked, China - unable to afford Windows- would be a massive base of innovation for Linux desktops, and ultimately undermine Microsoft. If copyright were strongly enforced, nobody there would know what Louis Vitton is - instead it is now home to their most profitable store.

Piracy is great marketing. Better even than free. You have distribution of free accelerated by the impression of value. The best reaction to piracy is to leverage the demand and user base.

[bad_user]

Yeah, but small software companies and freelancers are NOT Microsoft.

Windows and MS Office are software packages that you just use for years and years, probably for a lifetime. Once you're hooked, it's hard to switch. You cannot really compare Windows and MS Office with a game for which you lose interest in 2 weeks. Your business or other endeavors are not really depending on that game.

Also, Microsoft has enough power to lobby local governments to tighten anti-piracy laws and do so in their favor with special emphasis on their products.

Small indie developers can't really compare themselves with Microsoft. Piracy works for you as long as you've got room to convert pirated versions to non-pirated, or to increase the number of paying customers by using piracy for marketing, but again that really depends on the type of product you're selling ... for example, would paying customers gain any advantages, like fresh levels every 2 weeks?

[_3u10]

I guess you've never read the Open Letter to Hobbyists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

The best thing to do is estimate the number of users and use it in the marketing. (eg. instead of 200 copies sold, say 2000 users, etc)

[bad_user]

I don't think a letter from 1976 best represents Microsoft's strategy from the 90ties or from today.

[_3u10]

My point is that piracy can be very good for small companies and is an indication that people like what you're doing.

[sandGorgon]

One of the big reasons that China or India (which might be linguistically closer) is not a hotbed for Linux innovation is because of the linux leadership. Hold more conferences here, incorporate features required for a non-Roman script market and see it explode. FYI - every known computer maker sells OS-free machines: both because the local piracy driven market demands it and that a lot of people use Linux as an alternative to Windows (India Dell level 2 customer support will answer Ubuntu questions)

[w1ntermute]

> incorporate features required for a non-Roman script market

Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages. Everything's in English, and when people do write in an Indian language, it's using a bastardized, improvised romanization. So non-Roman script support is a non-issue.

[Derbasti]

Is that true? How interesting! How do you know this? Do you live in India?

[w1ntermute]

No, I'm American. Read about it on Wikipedia and some other sites. I'm a bit of an amateur linguist, so it's interesting to me (though also sad - the internet is the future, so without online usage, a language has no future).

India has so many languages that all official business is done in English. Since (just like in every other country) computers first appeared in big businesses, only English support was needed. The types of people working at those companies are fluent in English. Most of them went to English-medium schools ever since kindergarten. All of the universities are English-medium, so if you don't learn everything in English from when you're little, you'll never stand a chance in the hypercompetitive university entrance exams.

This made computer adoption very easy - just get some American computers and you're good to go. No time wasted localizing anything. Localization would have been a huge problem in India (a much bigger problem than China) because there are so many languages, and they all have a different script. A veritable nightmare for computer vendors - how many types of keyboards do you have to stock and keep track of? In the cities (where computers appeared first), there would be people from all over the country, speaking and writing all kinds of different languages. There's no one language that everyone knows that you can standardize on.

In China, OTOH, the strong, authoritarian central government made sure that everyone was educated in one language (Mandarin), and even if they weren't, the same script is used by all the languages (since it's character-based, not phonetic-based). This means that all business in China is conducted in Mandarin, and of course, nationalistic fervor wouldn't have allowed computers to simply remain unlocalized. Moreover, the phonetic pinyin input system doesn't require keyboard localization, so the Chinese just use American keyboards as well.

[sandGorgon]

You are close to the answer, but not quite there.

You see a lot of government work has to be done in the vernacular ( by political necessity) - and the defacto tool for written communication happens to be Word. Now, I have been trying to (as part of Accountability Initiative and other egov channels) get the govt to adopt open source alternatives like OpenOffice. But the problem is that complex Indic languages are NOT a priority for either Gnome or KDE (and frankly dont work that well on Linux). For example, the Harfbuzz project mentions somewhere For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType. Graphite is of course, the Indic compatible smartfont technology. Again, I might be completely wrong by way of technology, but the fact remains that the world's fastest growing computing market doesnt have significant linux mindshare. Very sad considering tha it is very very easy to do that in India.. much more than Europe or America, where you have to de-Apple people.

What really, really hurts me though is the fact that a significant (>70%) number of Indian colleges teach programming in Borland C. Why ? well it is easy to blame our cultural proclivity to resist change - but the easier answer is that they dont know any better. Remember, India does not have a significant amount of internet penetration: Network effects happen more due to physical communities rather than electronic ones .

Asia (and especially India) is at the cusp of an open-source revolution just because we cant afford anything else. Come over and start one.

[loxs]

I live in Bulgaria. The official script here is Cyrillic. Although all OSs support Cyrillic, the vast majority of users use the so called 'shlyokavitsa' - using ASCII to write in Bulgarian, which (as expected) is not very suitable for the purpose. The result is extremely low quality (and hard to read) text. And yet, this is probably 90% of the talk in chats, facebook and other venues where 'ordinary' people interact. I have friends who are Arabs and they do the same (though, they at least have a good excuse as computers around here don't have Arabic keys). I have no reasons to believe that the situation in India is any different. Some countries go even further, and make Latin their second official script. This is the situation in Serbia at the moment (Cyrillic and Latin).

[gaius]

The official languages of India are Hindi and English. All government business and most commerce and tech is done in English. You have to remember that what looks like "India" on a map was hundreds of smaller territories unified by the British Empire, and each had its own dialect. It would be impossible to support all of them.

[rmc]

I've been to parts of Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia) promoting Linux. Except for Ethiopia all languages there are written in ASCII, and English (or French) is sometimes the official state language and commonly spoken. However Windows is still massively used and massively pirated.

[asdkfj9876]

when did you turn into such a know-it-all patio? All I see from you is arrogant one liners for the last few months.

It's been interesting seeing how your (modest) success has turned you into an asshole - shame really.

[melvinram]

Patios statement was that moving to SaaS model removes piracy.

I see no asshole-ish nature and I'd bet it's 100% on the money, though I've never sold downloadables so I can't speak from experience.

Let's stay above name calling. We're all adults here.

[ewald]

And how could he move into SaaS? It's a simple game, not a business app.

I think patio's advice doesn't help at all in this particular case.

[nupark2]

I agree with this sentiment, but not the expression of it.

[patio11]

An open invitation: If you see me being glib and handwavy, please, ask for an elaboration. I have many faults. Insufficient desire to talk is not usually one of them.

I'll happily write up 800 words on why SaaS means piracy vanishes overnight, but the short version is just as informative: pirating the client means you can pirate the service like "pirating" Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp. Do you want me to talk about the China angle and how essentially all games in China (and Korea before it) are currently "free to play" with property/boosts/etc maintained on the server? And how that model is going to become dominant in the US, too, because gamers are voting for it with their wallets?

[earl]

  It's been interesting seeing how your (modest) success has turned you into an asshole - shame really.

Perhaps when accusing patio11 of being an asshole -- which I don't believe to be the case -- you could try not being a snide asshole yourself with your "(modest)" remark? Plus, even a cursory scan of his comment stream ( http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 ) disproves your assertion.