TouchArcade Rating:

We haven’t had an interesting piracy story in a while, it seems. Part of this is because so many developers are moving away from paid games on mobile because they’re such a risk to build a sustainable business off of. But, for those who still release paid games, piracy is still a rough situation, and not just on Android. SumiKen: Ink Blade Samurai ($0.99) released in May, and saw over 300 sales. However, the game has seen 3,410 players. Now, while this isn’t a 10:1 pirates:sales ratio necessarily, since family sharing and people playing on iPhone and iPad could muddy up these numbers. But each legitimate purchase playing on 11 devices is unrealistically high. There are way more pirated copies of SumiKen being played than legitimate ones.

Now, it’d be interesting to get some piracy numbers from other develoers, perhaps ones who have sold more. After all, this ratio seems bad, but it might be a byproduct of the game only getting a few hundred downloads, and there being a de facto default audience of who’s going to pirate a particular game. Those extra 3000 downloads might have never actually bought SumiKen, but are from a crowd that downloads games for free en masse because they can. But, sure, I won’t deny that there’s probably a few people that pirated the game instead of buying it, of course.

If you’re a developer with a release this year that wants to share some sales/piracy info, hit us up on the tips line. And if you pirated SumiKen, well…maybe toss a few bucks the developers’ way. We were all broke college kids once, and I understand that, but considering how many pirates are actually adults with jobs, come on. More of y’all can pay the $1.99 for this game.