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DAILY MANIFESTO

Are Torrents The Best Advertising For Free Android Apps?

Posted on Thursday, March 22 @ 13:54:53 Eastern by Nicholas Tan

Yesterday, user The Friendly Monster on NeoGAF conducted a small experiment with his Android game Total Pool. First he promoted his game in all of the "legitimate" ways by linking his game on the Google Play page to Facebook, G+, NeoGAF, xda, and reddit.

He then placed a torrent on The Pirate Bay with a sloppy description, "Shit hot pool game on Android", that would direct downloaders to the ad-supported free version of his game, versus the $.99 paid version.

Finally, he compared the results as of 12:00pm today. Whereas 50 people downloaded his game through Google Play, he estimates that at least the same amount of people ("a more realistic estimate at least doubles this") have downloaded the torrent:

So what am I saying? Piracy (attempted) is more popular than legitimacy? Google's store is a failure? I have no friends? My game is shit rather than shit-hot?

I don't really know, and to be honest I was kind of expecting this, I think that makes it worse.

Now, a few things before we jump to conclusions. First off, can this really be called pirating if the developer is the one providing the torrent? And then there are just pirates who download everything for the sake of doing so. And as one commenter responds: "When games are free downloads, torrents are as legit as regular publishing platforms."

However it looks, though, it seems that this supports the case that torrents might be a better way to advertise and promote free, ad-based games than through what some people perceive as the messed-up, drowned-out Android marketplace.

[Source]

Tags: Android, Piracy

Comments

drathbone
Joined: May 2011

Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 2:56 pm
I thought Pirate Bay was shut down and no longer had uploaded illegal stuff. Guess that didn't last long.

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ShadeTail
Joined: Nov 2006

Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 7:28 pm
Pirate Bay is a foreign web site in a country with much looser (I would say *fairer*) copyright laws. It was never shut down in the first place. And they don't store the actual files, merely the torrent links used to download them.

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dirty_f
Joined: Nov 2010

Posted: Mar 22nd, 2012 at 6:13 pm
my question is are we getting to the point where publishers are perhaps feeling that maybe combatting piracy might not work, and that it's time to start using it to their advantage? a good example is the aussie movie The Tunnel which was uploaded for free for people to download on torrent sites. the idea was that you downloaded the movie, then had the option of going to their site and purchasing the dvd or other things, like framed stills from the film, or parts of the script and so forth. it was a good movie and remains on the #1 spot of horror torrents.

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Nick_Tan
Joined: Jul 2006

Posted: Mar 23rd, 2012 at 1:16 am
Blake Peterson told me that movie makers, particularly independent ones, find that this kind of free-to-view idea might be more beneficial to them. Kind of like musicians who give away their music free but sell loads of T-shirts, collector boxes, tickets, and stuff that fans want to buy from them. It's something that the bigwig corporations hate, but something that the little guy can appreciate and make a living.

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