Four Door Lemon reveals QuizQuizQuiz's piracy rate is 23%

While piracy rates seem to fluctuate from one title to the next, something that remains constant – the willingness of developers to talk about it.

Such is the current climate that, during a blog post designed to round up the performance of one of its titles, UK studio Four Door Lemon included the percentage of copies that have ended up in rogue hands.

Interestingly enough, MD Simon Barratt claims piracy wasn't initially a problem for the game in question – trivia title QuizQuizQuiz – but it soon took off once the title appeared on a file sharing website.

"The current stats show that 23 percent of the people who have played the game were playing pirated versions," Barratt says in the post.

"We do detect pirated copies, but we didn't do anything about them as we hoped they’d convert to purchases or encourage friends to try.

"We also have stats showing these people did play just as much as paying users though they tailed off a little earlier - due to less investment in the product, I would think."

Such a figure is certainly less than those touted by some rival developers.

Aqua Globs studio Qwiboo recently made headlines claiming the game's piracy rate on iPad is at 50 percent, while We Are Colin also stated Gravity Runner's OpenFeint leaderboards were initially populated by more than three times as many users as had actually purchased the title.

Lost in translation

Nonetheless, piracy forms just a small part of Four Door Lemon's summary of QuizQuizQuiz's performance, with Barratt dedicating much time to the title's performance overseas.

While the title recorded solid initial sales – topping 70,000 downloads within the first couple of months – the majority of those were made in major European territories, the UK, France, Germany and Italy accounting for 72 percent of downloads.

As such, it would appear US consumers have so far failed to take to QuizQuizQuiz, with Barratt concerned that, for a multitude of reasons, the developer is missing out on the App Store's biggest market.

"When we were enjoying the success in Europe we were praying that we’d get a staggered mirror of the results in the largest App Store market," Barratt continues.

"This didn't happen, and our US sales before Europe took off were actually higher than anything we did later on, bizarrely."

Barratt speculates that US consumers might be reluctant to splash out on a trivia title from a UK based developer fearing its content will be confined to the European market.

However, equally significant is the fact that, despite Four Door Lemon releasing a dedicated localised Spanish version of the title, sales in the region account for just 3 percent of QuizQuizQuiz's total.

[source: Four Door Lemon]