Will Nokia's MOSH UGC service fuel mobile game piracy?
Big-name games already uploaded for 'sharing'
Nokia has launched MOSH, which despite the name isn't anything to do with rocktacular mobile music. Instead, it's a new mobile user-generated content service.
It stands for Mobilize and Share, by the way, and the idea is that you can upload and share photos, videos and music with other MOSH users. And games.
Games? Well, yes. MOSH is in private beta at the moment, but we've been poking around the site after getting our login, and on the 'Most Recent' games uploads page we've found full versions of EA Mobile's Burnout and FIFA 2007 3D, Gameloft's Guitar Legend, and Glu's Project Gotham Racing.
We downloaded FIFA, and it worked first time on our N73.
This has got us thinking. While we can see the benefits of how MOSH could be used to distribute demos or free titles (such as for N-Gage), there remains a concern with regards to piracy and it's something we feel will need policing.
There are other websites offering commercial mobile game files, of course, but they're not run by Nokia. And we do wonder just how many mobile users have a legal, non-copyright-infringing stash of mobile games to share anyway.
What the mobile games publishers themselves will make of the service is anyone's guess – although every download page has a link to report abuse, which includes 'illegal content', and Nokia has set up a dedicated [email protected] email address which is listed on the 'Contact Us' page of MOSH.
Anyway, MOSH includes a website, mobile site and downloadable MOSH application. The service looks slick and easy to use, but it remains to be seen how it'll tackle potential piracy from users keen to share their games with the community.
