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Applicationsgames 303 days ago | | 3 Comments

Android game piracy drives ‘Dead Trigger’ to a $0 price tag

dead trigger

Dead Trigger, a shoot-em-up Android game, has been driven to the rock bottom price of zero dollars as a result of a rise in Android piracy. It turns out that $0.99 is just too much to pay for a game on Android nowadays – that’s just not right. The developers don’t seem to be too happy about the situation, but will continue to develop and support the game.

This is Madfinger Games’ official statement, delivered by Facebook:

The main reason: piracy rate on Android devices, that was unbelievably high. At first we intend to make this game available for as many people as possible – that’s why it was for as little as buck. – It was much less than 8$ for SHADOWGUN but on the other hand we didn’t dare to provide it for free, since we hadn’t got XP with free-to-play format so far. – However, even for one buck, the piracy rate is soooo giant, that we finally decided to provide DEAD TRIGGER for free. Anyway – DEAD TRIGGER is not FREEMIUM, it always was and still remains FREE-TO-PLAY, that means, all players are able to play it without IAP! We stand up for this statement, because all members of our team are playing (and enjoying) DEAD TRIGGER without IAP.

The devs made it clear that the game is free-to-play for everyone and is available with IAP, just to make us all happy. While it is quite sad to see the piracy level to high, we are always happy to have another free game available for all. If you have a look at the statistics on Google Play you can see how ridiculously much the app downloads have sky rocketed (image on right).

Are you an Android gamer? Do you mind paying $1 for a game?

DEAD TRIGGER on AppAware

Source: The Verge

Written by : Josh is the founder of Android Australia. He is an adamant vegan, tech enthusiast and psychology student. He is currently a Google Chromebook Product Specialist and a Student Ambassador. You should probably follow him at +Josh on Twitter or on his personal blog!
  • Cam Charles

    to copy and paste my comment from the daily hit

    im really interested in where madfinger got their info on the piracy rate of their game and how exactly they know that it alone is the reason for poor app sales for instance its proven that even a $1 app especially high end games benefit hugely from a trial or demo but either way the some old stuff about the openess of android will always lead to high piracy is being thrown around which is just rubbish imo but anyway changes in jellybean regarding per device/app pair ids should stem the flow.

    also i brought the game exactly 12 hours before the price drop not because i wanted it but because i liked shadow gun and will “probably” play dead trigger and wanted to support the dev, i havent even played it, i feel kind of burnt but jeebus there are some PO’d people out there going mental about it, crazy

    • http://androidaustralia.com.au Josh Berg

      Can’t believe you picked it up 12 hours before the drop – at least it was only $0.99 at the time!

      I think the devs found that there were barely any downloads of the game at all. You can see by the chart above how much the downloads have improved in the last day, which would suggest that making it free made a difference. People would still buy the game at $0.99, but I guess it just wasn’t working out for the devs. Perhaps they have bigger and better plans with a free service?

  • Claire Phee

    downloaded it to try after it became free and it’s actually a pretty good title, graphics- and controls-wise. But it’s only about shooting and killing zombies, hardly any substantial plot or anything. anyway, it seems highly unfortunate that they have had to do that after “facing heavy piracy”, although i can’t shake the feeling that they did this just as a marketing ploy to get more people to download it and spend on in-app payments instead…