Is an in-app purchase required to unlock game in order to bypass pirating acceptable?
- by digitaljoel
I'm considering writing a mobile game and looking at distribution. The game will have a server requirement, which means I will have to pay for bandwidth, hosting, processor time, etc. Because of that I'll need to make at least a little money off this thing. According to the press piracy is rampant in the android community. To get around this, I'm thinking of implementing a simple model where the game is free, perhaps allowing play for X number of turns or something, and then requiring an in-app purchase to continue to play. I would clearly explain this in the app description, and the in-app purchase would be managed per account so it would be linked to your google play account so you wouldn't have to re-purchase every time you get a new device.
Would gamers accept this model or see it as unreasonable?