[asperous]

This kind of thing kind of scares me to be honest. It's almost a peek into a horrific dystopian future where piracy is so rampant that games, music videos, and perhaps even movies are only made as a marketing effort and are filled with advertising, branding, and product placement.

[mertd]

Your fear is misplaced.

1) The game exclusively on IOS, where piracy is minuscule. It couldn't have been the motivator.

2) People are willing to pay for good quality and convenience instead of pirating (e.g., Steam, Netflix, game consoles).

[alexqgb]

Well, that preference also has a lot to do with the fact that pirate sites have been criminalized, marganilized, and otherwise made sketchier and / or more difficult than they would be without state-imposed friction.

[gdeglin]

Piracy is actually very high on iOS, especially when it comes to paid apps: "when Wind-up Knight for iOS was a paid app, the piracy rate reportedly went 80%" (http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/07/piracy-rates-are-higher-on-...)

This is one reason why so many games are going freemium and sever backed. (Even iAP is frequently hacked unless the purchases are stored or at least verified on a server).

[nacs]

That linked article is over a year old. Each iOS device and OS release since then has gotten harder and harder to jailbreak and 6.1.4 didn't even receive a jailbreak till a few days ago.

I'd bet that Android piracy is far higher than iOS is at the moment.