Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.

As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

That's a huge amount of effort for very little return - 0.1% effective (and it's also a handy statistic in the 'illegal download debate' that's going on around the world). Reflexive looked at a number of strategies to reduce the warez, including expiring keygens, negating cracks, and game-specific key gens, and the article breaks down the results of each attempt

The bottom line is that the mobile gaming industry is subtly different to the regular market, and the publishers that work out the best way to address the market (and not the one that fits their books or existing ideals) could well steal a march on everyone else.

The full article is here.