Within days of the May debut of James Vaughan´s 99-cent game, “Plague Inc.,” on Apple Inc.´s App Store, hackers made it
available online for free.
“Piracy is a problem of success,”said Vaughan, whose game lets players infect a virtual world with pathogens. “I can´t be too angry about piracy.”
As much as35 percent of the game´s downloads have been illegal, he said.
The game has gotten 1.6 million paid downloads, so had all the pirated downloads also been paid, the 25-year-old Londoner
would have earned more than $500,000 more.
Long the scourge ofthe movie, music and video-game industries, pirates have turned their attention to apps, making a significant dent in
mobile-app store sales, which researcher Yankee Group expects to generate $10.1 billion this year, Bloomberg Businessweek
reports in its Nov. 5 issue.
