Spare a thought today for mobile games developer Lucky Frame, which has revealed some eye-watering piracy statistics for its (excellent) Gentlemen! game on Android. The game was released in July as a £2.99 download on the Google Play store, and developer Yann Seznec has explained how it has sold in its first three weeks: “144 copies sold, 50,030 copies pirated.” Ouch. That’s a 99.7% piracy rate, which even by Android’s standards is rather extreme. Not that Lucky Frame seem too upset. “In reality the number of pirates just confirmed to us that we made a game that people love to play,” writes Seznec. “The people who are pirating our game are also playing a surprising amount, with really great engagement – these are no casual pirates just downloading because they can. So this confirmed to us that our game design is solid, and that we’ve made a super fun game that people enjoy. To be honest, that is really great. It’s unlikely that any of these pirates would have bought the game anyway, so we’re just glad that people are playing.” Even so, it’s stories like this that mean most whizzy (paid) music album-apps will remain iOS-only affairs for now.
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…