Get some taste of the best PIRATE Game...for HALLOWEEN!!!

Here are some action shots from the game from our loyal Fans:

Silver Skull Update 1.2 LIVE in the App Store!

To celebrate the fact that our new update has gone live we have dropped the price again to $0.99! We have tinkered with some of the finer points of the game including weapons prices in the armory, the placement of certain bonus items and treasure in the maps as well as improving the port experience for users.

All of these improvements are meant to make the game a little easier for first time players since we were noticing that some players were finding it too hard the first time they played. You can check out the new version of the app here.

We also changed our icon per the suggestions of our users in the icon survey we conducted on Touch Arcade.

For all of you South Park fans here is their take on the pirate theme!

Silver Skull Lite is Live!

After over 3 weeks of waiting and one rejected lite version we finally have Silver Skull Lite live in the App store! Now you can be the captain of a pirate ship, destroying ships and capturing booty while spending money in the port on weapons, wenches and rum! You can download the free version here...and check out the video below:



And to celebrate the approval we have also lowered the price of our Paid version to $0.99 for the next few days (link to iTunes).

We love your feedback so please leave a review in iTunes or send us an e-mail here.

Help Us Design Our New Pirate Game Icon

Our new pirate game, Silver Skull, just went live in the app store several weeks ago and we have decided to change our icon for the next update.  We have a few options but are always open to any new ones you suggest or can come up with!  And we will give out 5 promo codes to the best suggestions or submissions we get. 

See the choices below:

Option #1 - Existing Icon

Option #2 - Anchor

Option #3 - Ship silhouette

Option #4 - Letter S

Option #5 - Anchor with Blue Wave




Option #6 - Letter S with Blue Wave

Please let us know in the comments which one you like or send us some ideas here of what you think would work better.  We are happy to use any icon anyone comes up with provided it is original and you can provide a 512x512 size for Apple.

Our Pirate Game is Getting Owned by App Store Pirates!

When we launched our first iPhone app iCombat several months ago we found an incredible rate of piracy, with almost 60% of total users using cracked copies 30 days in (80+% during the first 7 days). The piracy issue and how we chose to deal with it became such a big topic at the time (see Gizmodo post here) that we eventually decided to make our second title, Silver Skull, a pirate game - literally.

We thought creating an app where the player is the pirate would be clever somehow but one thing we didn't quite consider was that this game too would be cracked! Of course it seems obvious that it would be but when we saw the spike in Pinch Media unique users last week we were surprised. Had we been covered in a major blog, been featured in iTunes or maybe been tweeted about by Ashton Kutcher? Hardly. Our pirate themed game had been pirated, how ironic.

The frustrating thing this time is that, unlike with the iCombat release that enjoyed strong press at launch, Silver Skull has been covered less and so pirated users, if we calculate as the difference between iTunes sales and Pinch Media usage statistics, comprise a disproportionate percentage of our users.

Early stats about how pirates are owning our new app:

• 85% of current users are using cracked copies (1 week after going live)
• 7 of the top 10 entries in Google when searching under "Silver Skull iPhone" are links to cracked sites
• 15+ tweets in the last 7 days linking to cracked copies in Twitter
• 15x jump in unique users when the first cracked copies went live(off of a small base though)
• Rapid sampling of game.  Usage analytics tell us that most of these pirated users don't play deep into the game.

Why we are not that concerned that our app has been pirated:

• Rate of piracy declines rapidly. iCombat showed us that piracy rates trail off the more time the game is live (dropped to below 50% after 3 months).  Since pirates are very early adopters, they tend to cycle through apps quickly.  Novelty is the rush not free. 
• Piracy boosted paid sales. Our sales nearly doubled in the days following the release of the cracked version.
• Any attention is better than no attention.  It has become increasingly difficult to get noticed in the app store so having users, any users, is better than nothing (see our full post on this here). 
• Lite version is going live soon.  This should deflate much of the push to pirate as again, pirates are more focused on sampling, not long term usage.