The prevalence of piracy on digital formats appears to be an almost accepted, if not tolerated, part of business within mobile development.

While illegal download rates tend to differ by source, knowing just how to curb their rise remains something of a mystery.

It's perhaps understandable, then, that one independent developer has taken to TouchArcade's forums to appeal to fellow studios to detail their own experiences with piracy.

As detailed in the post, We Are Colin's latest release - Gravity Runner on iPhone – appears to be suffering thanks to what would seem to be an especially high ratio of illegal downloads.

The developer reports the title was purchased 225 times during its first two days on the App Store, yet its OpenFeint leaderboards registered around 750 separate accounts within the same period.

We caught up with We Are Colin founder John Sear to ask just how the developer is responding to the news.

Pocket Gamer: How could the piracy of Gravity Runner affect We Are Colin as a business?

John Sear: Our OpenFeint leaderboards are showing roughly five times our number of sales, and I'd imagine that users who pirated the game might be less inclined to use the online component, so real piracy rates could be much higher.

Any lost sale has a huge impact on us. We try and operate as leanly as possible so every penny we miss out on will count. We're running month to month - so the more revenue we make the longer we can operate for and the more games we can produce.

It's initially frustrating, since the majority of arguments presented by those who download illegally is that it's too expensive, or that they wouldn't have played the game anyway, but neither excuse appears to be true in our case.

Generally I don't think they think much about the developers of the products - it's easier to justify when its the product of a large corporation making billions of pounds as they won't miss 59p.

For us, we're just a few guys in a room trying to make a living in a very tough market. All we can hope is that pirates use the illegal version as a demo, going on to buy if they think it's any good.

What steps are you taking to deal with piracy?

We take the positives where we can. At least people are playing the game, even if they feel it is not worth 59p.

We've had lots of great feedback and there are plenty of things we will be improving - so there will be a number of updates coming out. As we improve our copy protection it will get more and more awkward to pirate our games - but you can't stop it completely.

It's a shame really - I'd rather not have to invest our energy in making it more difficult for people to play our games. That time should be spent improving our games in a way that all our players can benefit from.

We actually considered factoring piracy in and releasing games that are purely funded by advertising, but the returns from the adverts were so low that we quickly revised our position.

It's something we could consider in the future, however - at least then we'd receive a tiny amount of revenue from everyone who pirates and plays the game.

What do you think Apple should do to take on the pirates?

Well it's obviously in Apple's interest to stop it too, since they take 30 percent of the app revenue - although you could argue that it's making money from pirates buying the device in the first place.

It's not something that any platform holder goes out to do, but it does seem that all popular platforms suffer from some piracy.

I guess its an attractive selling point to some people. Sure the phone is many hundreds of pounds, but just jailbreak your phone and you can have all the software for free. It's a very tough battle and if you have a product that someone wants it's only a matter of time.

Apple will never be able to stop it completely.

What longterm impact do you think piracy is having on mobile games development?

At the very least piracy means developers are using time they could spend on improving the game worrying about how to reduce piracy rates.

Digital download platforms have created a fantastic opportunity in the industry. Experienced developers have been encouraged to give independent development a try, and that means we've got lots of very talented people creating fun and original titles.

It's these small games developers will go out of business thanks to piracy in a worst case scenario, however. It's sad to think that an individual who has chosen not to pay 59p for a game could be behind the developer's demise.

Also, I think that the high profile many mega hits from small studios have garnered means those who pirate don't see that the majority of apps really don't make any money.
Thanks to John for his time.