this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Lovely, so your rebuttal is that not only is my emotion wrong but my software sucks, too. I would suggest putting yourself in my shoes and envisioning what a shitty thing that is to say.
To offer a bit of background: the clone my game published itself on Google Play with ads removed. Aside from simply the confusion of a game with verbatim the same name, this further entices users to install it, because Google Play displays a label when an app contains ads.
What is the worth to a user? This is a terrific question, and I have spent years narrowing down the right valuation of ad content and in-app purchase pricing to remove ads. The game currently has 15M historical installs with fairly industry standard retention rates, so it can't be completely off. But the thing is, that valuation will always be higher than 0.
So where does the steal come from? The cloned app only offered the ad-free experience long enough to gather enough installs, to then revert the change with a swapped out AdMob account number.
I think most of this has been offset by that change now as I've seen a similar growth return to my app. But those losses in the interim period are gone forever. Somebody took my code base, republished it in blatant violation of GPL, causing me to lose revenue. I feel robbed and your apathy genuinely perplexes me.