Rampant piracy of Indonesian games on Amazon's appstore (UPDATED)

Game piracy is far from dead, but it has mostly been rooted out of the mainstream app stores—you’re unlikely to find a pirated game on Google Play or the Apple App Store, for example. But the same apparently can’t be said for the Amazon appstore, which is hosting pirated versions of a number of Asian mobile games.

For example, there’s Indonesia-based Touchten’s Infinite Sky. The real version of the game is available on the Google Play store, but Touchten recently discovered that some developer called Banana Games was selling a pirated copy of the game on the Amazon appstore.

A screenshot of the pirated version of the app on Amazon’s appstore.

And Touchten isn’t the only Indonesian studio being stolen from. The same pirate outfit is selling an illegal copy of Qajoo Studio’s game Run Princess Run (you can get the real game here). And Toge Productions‘s game Infectonator is also being illegally sold on the Amazon appstore, this time by a developer called Tuna Fish (you can get a legit copy of Infectonator here).

Touchten CEO Anton Soeharyo told Games in Asia that Touchten has already reported the issue to Amazon, and is waiting while Amazon investigates the issue. As a developer, he said he had mixed feelings about discovering his game was being stolen:

I am flattered that anyone would want to make the effort to “pirate” my game, and find it worth the time and money. But at the same time, I do not want users to be confused and my company to be misrepresented. I am [concerned about] what kind of “malware” these pirates usually put out there, which could damage our reputation.

We have reached out to Amazon for comment on these cases in specific as well as for clarification about the anti-piracy measures in place on the appstore, and will update this post if we hear back.

UPDATE: An Amazon spokesperson has responded:

Amazon respects the intellectual property of others and requires that developers have all applicable rights to the apps they submit to our store. We also use several methods to detect and block apps with potential intellectual property concerns. In this case, two developers misrepresented their ownership of the apps they submitted. Their Appstore accounts, along with all their submitted apps, are now disabled.