October 8th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | 7 Comments »
While the industry has been fighting piracy for many years, there are companies who make use of pirated games and shady distribution circles to make big bucks from your mobile games and apps.
Both the teams over at HeroCraft and Pixalon Studios have been tracking several of their games that have been discovered to be sold in countries where the distributors have no permission to do so. Apart from often using pirated games, the companies we contacted have built up distribution circles as well. To give you an example of what a distribution circle is;
Company A is selling Game X. When contacted, Company A says they obtained the license from Company B. Company B has the games from Company C while Company C licensed them from Company A. Get the point?
In other words, they all point to each other for supplying the games and the rights to sell them and hide behind NDA’s so it is nearly impossible to find out who is telling the truth. Of course, branded games are popular with such companies as well. We checked only four of the catalogues Zgroup is offering and we found games from Konami, Glu Mobile, I-play, Javaground / Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, Herocraft, Qplaze, Disney Mobile , Sega Mobile, HandyGames, Connect2Media, EA mobile, Herocraft, Digital Chocolate, Real Arcade, Gameleons, Gameloft & Pixalon Studios.
One of the companies that was mentioned mostly is Zgroup, a company based in Syria and operating for about 10 years. They have dozens of content catalogues with games from pretty much any developer alive and that makes the way they do business very hard to believe. No, we are not accusing them, but feel free to find out for yourself (mirror)
Within those circles, the following companies have often been mentioned; MediaLead, HappyTube, Faces of Mars, Mobi2Fun, Mobile Entertainment Pvt Ltd & JoyBits. Now we are not accusing all companies from conducting illegal business, but it is a smart idea in general to check if they sell your games and have the rights for it.
The most recent chain of aggregators Herocraft discovered:
- One of our channels Playwork(Thailand) has reported about strange broken game
- They’ve got the game from India Games.
- IG said they’ve got it from Mobi2Fun(India) –
- Mobi2fun got it from Thumbstargames-UK –
- Thubmstar got it from Media Lead –
- Media Lead got it from Zgroup and … Mobi2Fun (loop?)
- Zgroup – keep silence, and they always did, it’s not the first time we have questions
The most ironic part is:
- This game is simply 100% stolen (downloaded from wap site of our developer)
- It’s in Russian language only
- It’s not working (copy protection), so end-users will have to pay twice (if they can, billing was for CIS only)
- Neither of 2-7 links checked that!
We have checked this story with various developers mentioned above and they validated current and past problems with this company.
UPDATE – on request, we put this post back to the top. Original publishing date was September 14th 2010.
We can confirm the story. Zgroup are probably the biggest cheaters in this industry!
I supplied one of my games to Faces of Mars almost 2 years ago, Patrick was a kind and helpful contact (he even did translated the ingame text into Spanish) but since then I’ve never heard from him again – not a single line, report or anything similar. So stay away from them – I should’ve known better given the unprofessional website – but then I’m long enough in this business and our own website doesn’t get much attention too. Nevertheless – by far the worst experience I had so far.
ah comeon no suprise! Zgroup was cheaters years ago. I would love to know to which companies they sold and still selling illegally.
Who does wonder about this, there are an couple of Aggregators outside who do Aggregator to Aggregator deals without correct reporting. I don’t mention any name but some of the names above really make some noise in my head!
The ugliest thing is that these numerous guys prosper for nearly 10 years, while legal developers and publishers are going down.
Arjan, how about hosting some kind of ‘mobile games fraud wiki’, where we could list and discuss persons, companies and B2C sites involved in this?
I’d also use someone’s hint on how to stop ZGroup. Maybe there’s a way to file a complaint to Syrian law enforces or something like this.
I also had a bad experience with ZGroup about a year and a half ago. They had 2 games from Pixalon we had the exclusive for and also one other of our own games in their catalogue.
When I contacted them about this, they first denied, then they told me they got them from a company called ‘m2mchina’, when asked to provide their contact details to investigate further, they just stopped answering.
I could not find contacts for this company (if it even actually exists – I only found an hardware manufacturer and a business facilitator company with that name)
I think that getting them the legal way would be way too hard and time-consuming, the best option is probably to find out who they actually sell to and inform them of the situation, hoping to make them switch to using trusted aggregators and publishers. I don’t think we can stop those pirates from freely spreading the content around, but at least we could prevent from making money on it … could we?
@ Alexey:
I think that would be dangerous, as such topics also could be easily missused to get rid of some unliked competitor.
It can only work if the proof is 100% in questionable…and that is almost impossible between all publishers, aggregators and devs as everyone has some secrets.
Basically you are right everyone who tries to run the business honestly should start to drain out those channels and give them no chance to continue with their way. But especially in the emerging countries this will be very hard and hard to follow.