5 things mobile game developers need to do to secure their games

1. Situation

As you know, the gaming industry is huge, even bigger than Hollywood! The gaming industry produced around $93 billion in revenue in 2014, which is expected to grow by 9% to around $111 billion in 2015. One of the segments to watch out for is mobile gaming. The world has seen a rapid growth in the number of mobile device users because of which the mobile gaming segment has already crossed the handheld devices segment and will soon cross the PC gaming segment too. While all this sounds great, game developers who want to remain in this market have to understand that their share of this pie is also at risk.

Mobile apps, and games in particular, are seeing an increasing number of hacking attacks. Most developers haven’t started to understand the impact this can have in the long term – on revenue, on brand reputation, and more. The cost involved in securing the application is less than a fraction of the potential revenue loss because of a hack.

2. Revenue loss due to mobile hacking

In the rush to get apps in the market, most developers keep security at the backseat. Often, time to market is everything for them and that can prove to be costly. Some real world examples show how mobile developers have lost 50% or more of their potential revenue because of hacking.

2.1 Real life example: Monument Valley app

Monument Valley is a paid mobile game available on iOS, Android and also Amazon Kindle for $3.99. It is an excellent game with brilliant visuals which has won them many awards like Apple iPad Game of the Year in 2014 and Unity Awards for Best 3D Visuals in 2014.

In a statement made by the developers of this game, Monument Valley was installed on 10 million devices but they actually sold only 2.4 million copies. Moreover, only 5% of the install on Android and 40% of installs on iOS were paid for!

In an infographic published by the developers, the company reported 2.4 million sales accounting for $5.8 million in revenue. If we assume that everyone who purchased this installed it on at least two devices, it still leaves around 5.2 million installs that are not accounted for! That’s $6.3 million in lost revenue!!

3. Common threats and solutions

Securing a mobile game application can be a complex task. The threats vary depending on different factors – type of games, platforms, the game architecture and more.

3.1 Game assets, art, code or data can be reverse engineered, changed, repackaged and launched in the market. Bigger problem – some might also have malware

Let’s take the example of a really popular game – Flappy Bird. In 2014, within a month of launch, Flappy Bird became the Top Free Game in iOS App Store. Interestingly, the developers claim they were making around $50,000 a day from in-app advertisements and sales. Just a month later, there were 60 different Flappy Bird clones being added, every single day! 79% of these clones were also reported to have malware.

3.2 Flaw in the in-app purchasing system allowing hackers to get access to items for free