The authors of Battlestation: Harbinger, a Finnish Bugbyte studio, spoke about their experience in combating piracy on Android using game notifications.
The Battlestation: Harbinger project was launched quite recently, in mid-August. This is a paid app – it costs $3.99 in both the App Store and Google Play.
The game was lucky, and both storas got it at once. Therefore, the authors of the project expected high indicators. But it turned out that it was almost immediately hacked and posted on pirate websites. Bugbyte cites statistics: a week after the launch, 70% of downloads from Google Play and 60% of downloads on iOS were unpaid (i.e. pirated).
The game was downloaded without payment up to 1000 times a day. Below is a graph in which the blue line is the number of pirated downloads per day, and the dark blue line is the DAU.
The authors of the game began to send notifications to pirates with Android devices. They said: “High level of piracy! Please support us. And also – you are pirates.” The notification contained a link. Clicking on it, the player got to the forum, where the Bugbyte team talked about themselves and why they would not be able to make games – if the players would not pay.
As a result, sales of the game increased by 15%.
The creators of the game believe that this not only helped to increase sales of their game, but also, perhaps, made some of the pirates come to their senses.
A source: http://gamasutra.com