When you hear about piracy you usually think of it in terms of PC games and movies downloaded illegally. Not a lot of attention has been paid to iOS games being pirated, but this is actually becoming a big problem for some developers.
Hunted Cow, the developers behind the iOS game Battle Dungeon, had to shut down its game yesterday afternoon because the servers weren’t able to handle the server load created by a large number of pirated copies of the game. When you go to their website, it shows a single page about what Hunted Cow told game fans:
“Unfortunately we have taken Battle Dungeon down for the forseeable future. This was due to high levels of server load created by large numbers of pirated copies of the game. The high load revealed technical issues which we don’t feel we can fix to the level that our paying customers deserve.”
In a forum post, Hunted Cow went on to explain that after a pirated .ipa surfaced on the Internet, the number of players joining the game multiplied. Since they were not paying customers, Hunted Cow didn’t have the resources to maintain the server. As a result, Battle Dungeon is no longer available on the App Store.
Any player who invested their money in the game will be able to get a refund by contacting support, which includes the $4.99 purchase price and any money that was spent on in-app purchases.
Image Credit: gamesaku
