Piracy is considered the bane of digital content by many content producers and distributors, but not all content is created equal — for example, mobile games are a fraction of the cost of console games had have an exponentially greater number of builds (so the chance of getting the right one for your handset and carrier is reduced). Stuart Dredge at PocketGamer interviewed Trip Hawkins from Digital Chocolate, Michael Laubscher from THQ Wireless and Hugues Wanner from The Mighty Troglodytes about this issue, with Hawkins being the most worried about piracy and the other two saying that it was a problem, but it was so difficult to get the correct build for your handset and install it correctly that the infringer probably wastes more time doing it than is worth by the money they save.
I was surprised that Hawkins didn’t tout his “connected gaming” philosophy, since this is one way to bypass the whole piracy issue. If there’s a monthly subscription fee to the game and connection to multiplayer features then it matters a lot less if the original program was pirated — it’s probably worth giving away. The other solution is ad-supported games (and why go to the effort of pirating Tetris when you can get an almost similar no-name game?), and a lot of these have sprung up lately. In fact, Israel’s largest operator Cellcom has just announced the launch of an ad-funded mobile games service powered by innerActive which offer free games sponsored by companies such as Nokia, McDonalds, Diadora, Samsung, Adidas and Walt Disney, which have product placement dynamically inserted into the game. While it’s true that free, ad-supported games are not the panacea to the problem of growing the mobile games industry I think they do reduce the amount of piracy that occurs. (release)
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