Arrrrr. The pirates have plundered StarDunk

You'd think that an iOS game that was originally priced at $0.99 and is now selling for $1.99 wouldn't have a piracy problem.

You'd be wrong.

French game developer Godzilab recently tweeted that they've seen a 37.5% piracy rate for their massively mulitplayer online basketball game, StarDunk. The tweet also included a plea for help -- "37.5% of StarDunk players are using a cracked version. If anybody has a good way of detecting them, we'll take it."

Mobile gaming site PocketGamer noted that in a followup, Godzilab said that the figure was calculated from the total number of copies of StarDunk that were sold in the App Store and the number of unique accounts that have been registered with the online (Plus+) server. The latter number was much larger than the former, leading to the online disclosure of the StarDunk piracy problem.

Whether the solution comes from Plus+, the developer, or a combination of the two, it's certain that someone is going to find a way to stop the piracy. Perhaps releasing the game in a free, ad-supported version for the people who can't afford to spend two bucks might sink the pirate ship.

Note: As the developers have noted in the comments, "We are actually counting the number of unique accounts, so if you install the game on iPad/iPod/iPhone multiple time and still use the same account we will count this as one game bought.
So yes, we might count a few users who have multiple account but that should only be a few."