DS, PSP, iPhone game piracy: is handheld DLC a gift to the pirates?

It’s all about handheld games right now. The iPhone has racked up 100,000 apps and 2 billion downloads, while the PSP is enjoying a rebirth thanks to its new focus on digital content.

But pirates have it even easier these days, as their process doesn’t even begin with getting the game off a disk, hacking it, and redistributing a massive file around the internet.

Digitally distributed games are already the perfect size for a quick and convenient download, and have no cumbersome physical media to compete with. A gift to the game pirates.

But this is nothing new, as Team17 founder Martyn Brown explains.

“The 20 plus platforms [we've developed for] over the last 20 years have all suffered to great degrees," he begins. "Our first, the Amiga, was shocking. I think the DS is bad, if not worse. As for PC, well, you’ve seen the decline in titles.”

Piracy has always been rife, right since kids first discovered that twin cassette decks could be used for more than just creating mix tapes from the charts on Sunday afternoon radio. But as budgets for game development have become at once more expensive and tighter, the losses that game companies suffer are far greater.

Recently, PixelJunk stated that the levels of piracy on its first PSP game were so excessive that it’s considering abandoning the platform altogether, something Martyn Brown touched upon with the decline in PC titles.

“There comes a commercial tipping point where piracy is at such a level that it’s simply not commercially viable to develop for it,” Brown continues. “Fortunately digital sales mean that a lot of the costs can be mitigated. You don’t have boxed content, less marketing, etc, but still, if [PixelJunk] is saying that, then they must be pretty disappointed.”

Very few games these days are played entirely offline, even if it’s simply a case of sending high scores to leaderboards, and this is one of the ways developers are getting more accurate - and daunting - figures on the levels of piracy they face. Korean mobile studio Gamevil has noticed exactly this kind of disturbingly open flaunting of pirated software.

“We've seen piracy across all of our platforms that we've been servicing, especially on Java and iPhone. Around 50 per cent of our game players are from piracy.”

Given that piracy is a problem as old as the industry, it does seem a little strange that the developer community appears surprised that the iPhone is suffering as much as any other platform.

Vivid Games’s Patryk Bukowiecki (a sociologist, I might add) realises that although game piracy isn’t something companies should simply accept, it’s become a natural and integral part of a great many players' gaming careers.

“Our games - both for mobile phones and for iPhone - has been nicely pirated shortly after the release and no one can do anything to prevent it,” Bukowiecki begins. “Piracy is something that I would call a necessary evil. There is - at this time - no cure, and it’s become written into social behaviour.”

All manner of code protection has been attempted over the years to funnel gamers back toward legitimate games, but ultimately the platform itself seems to be a one way roadblock. The third party developer can’t get past it, while pirates flood over the top.

“Piracy on the PSP is really a challenge for both developers and Sony,” continues Patryk Bukowiecki. “I would dare to say that it might be too late for PSP to recover from the damage caused by the custom firmware, M33 and other Dark Alexes. I don’t know specific statistics, but from what I know many PSP users are downloading games illegally and won’t jump over to the PlayStation Store that easily.”

Team17’s Martyn Brown agrees, only with the Nintendo's handheld in the spotlight: “In my personal opinion, on the DS, it’s already too late. Apple, I guess will fight jailbreaks with new firmware, but it’s a tough one and it’s obviously in their interest. With Nintendo it’s appeared so lax for so long, like they almost didn’t really care because they continued to shift new hardware.”

Jani Karhama of iPhone developer Secret Exit also told us of the attempts his company had made to confirm a game’s legitimacy, and the ultimate futility of the exercise given the restrictions and lack of interest programmers face from these hardware manufacturers.

“Our game detected if it had been tampered with and showed the user a ‘Thank You’ screen with a purchase link after a brief period of playing. It seemed like a gentle way of nudging people in the right direction,” says Karhama. “I believe it took a day or two before that measure was removed from a pirated version of the game.

“Allowing the developers to easily verify if the user, device and purchase are valid with a simple query from the official servers would be much appreciated.”

It’s a matter of considerable debate as to how concerned hardware manufacturers really are about piracy. Being a first party developer naturally puts a company like Nintendo - which is going to great lengths in Japan to block the sale and use of DS flash carts right now - in the same shoes as the rest of the development community, but it still doesn’t hurt hardware sales.

Apple has come under criticism for taking little interest in the apparently prolific pirating of iPhone games, with companies such as Fishlabs recently revealing piracy figures as high as 95 per cent within a day of a game being released.

Developers aren't allowed to upload encrypted code to the App Store, which many consider to be a short sighted tactic on Apple's part that sends their games to the slaughter. The platforms that have managed to resist piracy impressively well are the current range of living room consoles, as most developers recognise.

“I think there’s pretty much only been our XBLA titles where piracy hasn’t really occurred,” says Martyn Brown, with Zen Bound developer Jani Kahrama backing him up 100 per cent.

“There's no legitimate argument that justifies modifying a console to perform things it's not intended to do,” Kahrama says. “As an example, is there a large outcry right now that you can't run emulators on your new PS3 Slim? No, nobody's even expecting to do that because piracy is not established on that platform. But if you try to take away the benefits of jailbreaking [an iPhone] from those who are already taking advantage of it, the whining starts.”

Also in agreement that the handheld games industry should look toward the living room for anti-piracy guidance is Patryk Bukowiecki. “I think that Microsoft has pretty much shown how to deal with piracy,” he explains.

“If you get caught, well, too bad for you. Your console is banned and if you wish to stay in touch with your friends or play online, you have to buy a new console. You are encouraged to do so with the fact that you can use your account stored on a memory unit or hard drive, and your Gold Membership fee stays valid.”

And the truth of the matter is that the iPhone and the Xbox 360 aren’t miles apart, from an operational perspective. Both are inherently connected to the net and almost every game sends a personalised amount of data back and forth between the distribution service and the individual device.

The only difference is that Microsoft backs up its developers with security measures, while Apple, currently, makes little effort to ban the abusers.

"How about blocking user’s accounts, displaying them as “violators” of user terms? Maybe deactivating some of the device’s functionality for some period of time would work?" Bukowiecki asks Apple, not really expecting to get an answer any time soon.

Try not to think about it

It’s not all doom and gloom in the mobile and handheld gaming world, however. Despite the difficulties these developers have faced, none of them is downbeat about his profession.

“Let’s face it. If it were that much of an issue, we would be hearing about developers closing their offices because of selling ten legal copies and a million illegal downloads,” Bukowiecki continues.

Team17’s founder agrees that obsessing about the levels of piracy has negative implications that go beyond the financial, saying, “I have a rough rule of thumb that says every week we spend trying to curb piracy results in an hour of delay and prevention. So these days on better digital DRM, we don’t think about it too much.”

“It's important to note that the stories and opinions come from developers with hugely different business cases,” explains Jani kahrama, agreeing that piracy mustn’t be allowed dominate a developer’s existence. “Whether piracy is a fraction of your total sales or an overwhelming majority of them depends on the success of pre-launch marketing.”

Piracy isn’t going away. No matter what steps are taken by developers of hardware manufacturers, there’s always going to be some form of breakage for the code vendors. Neither is any form of security completely impenetrable. The best form of combat, it seems, is in dialogue with the gamers, in an effort to put a human face to the stolen property of pirated games.

If public opinion can shift toward the notion that it’s not an acceptable practice, and puts a sour taste in the mouths of otherwise honest people who casually download the occasional illegal game (in much the same way that public opinion has been turned against drink driving, or smoking), then the industry could be given a little breathing room to prove to gamers that properly funded software can be a benefit to all.

“We are people too, trying do our job,” Patryk Bukowiecki reminds us. “Stealing our job is unfair.”

“We’re a developer-publisher with a history of releasing titles at what we feel are realistic prices, harking right back to the Amiga,” concludes Martyn Brown.

“If you get something and enjoy it and play it for some time then do the right thing and contribute something to that developer’s income by either buying the game when reduced, buying the next game, or sending a cheque for whatever amount you feel it was worth in the post.

"None of this, 'I’m pirating it because I can’t afford it', because if I fancied a pint (*which has been known) I wouldn’t walk into the nearest pub and pour myself one. Continued heavy piracy will see platforms abandoned.”

“Piracy on the App Store has conclusively proven that the argument 'I only pirate games because they are too expensive' to be false,” Jani Kahrama says, rounding out the conversation. “Any inclination that game publishers may have had to lower their prices due to piracy has certainly vanished.”

Which really summarises the spate of piracy sweeping across the handheld games industry. Great games have never been so accessible or affordable, so whatever excuses any of us have employed for justifying a pirated game are well and truly dead.