Illegal mobile games - threat the mobile industry is still not well aware of
Mobile Games May 15th, 2008Earlier this year, I talked to many mobile game publishers and was trying to convince them on activity regarding the mobile game industry not being well aware of illegal mobile game downloads. I stated clearly that this is an issue that has to be taken care of.
Let us tell each other openly and honestly: Can we ignore ~90% of all games being downloaded illegally? How did I get to that number? Germany has hundreds of thousands game downloads per month. How many illegal games do you think there are? I would assume millions! Czech Republic - slightly over 200,000 paid game downloads each month, and around 900,000 of them downloaded illegally (the idiots do put up counters on the site).
Up to last month, the most visited site PiratesXXL had 10,000 daily unique visitors (300k per month, each one downloading several games - 2, 3, maybe even 5 - and they resend it - oh they do!). Just form this site we could count the 900k, so it probably IS more.
It IS a problem. In addition, more and more people learn how to download the mobile games for free. It’s even getting simpler - just type in whatever game name and add “.jar” behind it, you get the game
How do we not solve it?
- Sitting down and doing nothing
So how do we solve it? Lets get inspired by the MP3 industry.
- Close them down - sew them, talk to them, convince them, but simply somehow close them down
- Google Indexes are quick, but be quicker - Google Bots detect robots quite quickly index new games, we have to be quick in deleting them, so the sites that are indexed can’t be found
- Index your files higher - start optimising sites around our mobile games with “.jar” names. Lets have them indexed as people that would be looking for them for free.
- Games - Name “empty” games your game names, and put them out on the warez sites, have people confused and have them lower the quality
Who can understand how best to do this?
Well of course people that know both SEO and SEM optimisations, and that as well know the mobile games market, and the users that search for games. This can also be done quite cheap - a couple people really focused on a few key markets, and destroying the games there. Pay special attention to Russian, Slovak, Polish, and of course Czech servers.
I believe that if companies stick together on this one, we can do it!
Tags: mobile game piracy, mobile game problems, Mobile Games


May 16th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Or choose a different path. Release your games for free. And spread them as wide as possible. Easy…
p.s. don’t forget to ad-wrap them
May 16th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
tomas: But the issue of ad-wrapping is obvious - the internet connection, and there hasnt been really detailed information about how people react to ad-wrapped mobile games.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
To Jan: There exist also adwrap platforms and solutions which does not need an internet access to load an advertising. We run such solution with very good feedback.
I am totally agree with Tomas that this is only one way. Dont fight with warez servers, it is a lost battle.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:39 pm
jakub: Hey Jakub, hope you are doin fine. Yes, to some extent there are platforms like that, but then eventually its basically in-game offline advertising, and is hard to pull stats other then download stats, and impossible to change, other then upload. So eventually you are where I wrote…