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Madfinger Games’ iOS version of Dead Trigger is now free

August 2, 2012October 5, 2012 Calob Horton 2 Comments dead trigger, Games, iOS, iOS Apps, ios game, piracy

Last week, Madfinger Games, the game developer behind the popular Dead Trigger game for iOS and Android, made the Android version of the aforementioned game free due to piracy. The studio was disappointed in the “unbelievably high” rate of piracy on Android; instead of focusing on making money from app sales, Madfinger Games simply made the app free and started focusing on making money from in-app purchases.

Today, it’s clear that the studio thinks that was a good idea: Dead Trigger for iOS is now free on the iTunes App Store, down from the already-small price of $0.99. Madfinger Games CEO Marek Rabas wrote a response to the folks over at GameZebo detailing the decision to make the game free on iOS. The response is long, but the decision did come down to piracy this time, as well.

After saying that “the number of pirates on iOS is comparable with the amount of jailbroken devices,” Rabas goes on to write about his disappointment of the lack of protection that Apple and Google are providing for hard-working developers.

“At the moment, the cost of a mobile game is much more expensive than it was two years ago. As developers of games, we want to concentrate our time and dedicate ourselves only on games.?We want to make them better than previous games. This is why we need help with security from the companies who make the hardware. Their hardware is selling because of our content, and they should protect our games from being stolen. Its [sic] really good that Google and Apple are finally making some effort to deal with it. The same as Microsoft and Sony did in the past for their consoles. And so, lets hope that this situation will get better and developers will be able to invest more money into games without fear that in the end most of the players will download it for free anyway.”

If you’ve already purchased the game, don’t worry: you’ll be given 25 gold and 10 casino chips as compensation for your original purchase.

After reporting on the possible 19-pin anti-jailbreak cable, I can actually see at least Apple trying to prevent jailbreaking for more reasons than originally intended. If an iDevice user can’t jailbreak, that user will have a more difficult time installing pirated apps.