Closed for Business ⇥ mattgemmell.com

Yesterday, the developers of Dead Trigger, and Android and iOS game, announced that the Android version was going to be dropped to a price tag of nothing:

In a statement on Facebook, developer Madfinger Games says that even at $0.99, the piracy rate on Android devices was “unbelievably high.”

Matt Gemmell reflects on high piracy rates:

Piracy isn’t a symptom of social disease. Well, it might be, but your bank manager won’t care about that inconsequential detail. Piracy is a symptom of failure to find an effective business model. “Effective” here means the whole gamut of product quality, availability, platform, marketing, price, delivery, support and so on. It’s not black magic.

Very good points in this article. I’m sure there are ways of making lots of money on an Android app, but for many developers, setting up a means to do that (say, by cross-referencing a unique user ID with a known purchase receipt) is more difficult and time-consuming than their app warrants. It’s simply harder for the average developer to make money with a paid app on Android than on iOS.