A hilarious blog post of a studio who discovered there games are pirated. They even say
Of course, I would feel very bad if anybody paid $120 for a free game
I learned when I released an unsuccessful mobile game a couple years ago that there are apparently automated piracy sites out there. I say that because we found a seemingly hacked version of the game on some sketchy app sites just a week after releasing it (and nobody knew about our game, so I highly doubt it was done by hand).
There are a lot of websites that pretend to give you a hacked version but all the download button does is to show more ads. They just automatically fill pages with automatically stolen content from play store
Sounds believable. We definitely didn’t download it so I couldn’t say for sure.
But this game is a physical cartridge for an old console. It’s not just patching and rereleasing in digital form. And it will be shipped in a box. So this is not something that can be automated (at least not by everyone, other than Amazon maybe).
Totally agreed on that. Sorry didn’t mean to derail the thread. I just thought someone might be interested to know about the automated stuff.
No need for sorry and its understandable. Especially if one of your games or products are stolen or used without the license, and therefor want to bring attention to the subject. I can not even imagine how much automation must exist in the web, that’s only job is to steal and “repackage” data just to sell it on another platform. Happens with videos, with blog posts, with photos, … games… and basically anything one can imagine.
I was really shocked at the speed of it. Very surreal experience.
Downloading apps off app stores is easy. These sketchy websites can actually be real useful when developers decide to geolock their apps (i.e. when a local ride sharing app won’t download because your Google account isn’t from the country you’re visiting). apkmirror has also helped me obtain various Google apps that didn’t come with my phone’s custom ROM, though that’s one of the good ones that doesn’t alter apps.
Many of the sketchier will take apps and alter it to inject malware, though. By removing in-app purchases/ads/DRM with tools like lucky patcher they can explain away why people’s phones are calling these apps malware (because the alterations are to be expected), but the goal was never to give people free stuff, there’s always money behind it.
Things like apkmirror are doing god’s work as far as I’m concerned. No problems with them at all.
“for sale in Asia except Japan” => they wrote all the text in Japanese (and latin for the Lorem Ipsum on the back)
