The Price of Piracy

[Simply Applied]

The issue of piracy has been front and center lately, with the recent press release from MadFinger Games declaring “unbelievably high” piracy within Android as the reason they reduced the price on Dead Trigger from $1 to free in the Google Play Store. Technology blogs jumped on the story and a huge discussion resulted – both about Dead Trigger and also the bigger issue of piracy in general. The main beneficiary of all this was MadFinger, whose downloads of Dead Trigger skyrocketed as a result of the increased publicity. Madfinger’s CEO then published an article for Gamezebo making similar allegations regarding pirating on iOS while making the game free in the App Store.

The rest of the article can be found here, but I wanted to get some additional viewpoints on piracy.

Since this forum is mostly for developers, I'm interested in your thoughts on piracy, how it impacts your development efforts, how you market your apps, etc.

What measures do you take to prevent piracy?

Do you use the provided DRM in the Play Store and Amazon Appstore? Why/why not?

What can be done to reduce the problem?