Every computing platform is known for something. The Sega Game Gear is doomed to forever having a really bad battery life (although I bet Sony would quite happily take the six hour battery life the Game Gear offered). The Atari Lynx was just way too big (the Lynx II is always forgotten). And the N-Gage? Every game is available online for you to download and play. For free. In the dark corners of the Internet
It's not something that's restricted to the N-Gage. It's probably just as widespread on other platforms. The Gameboy Advance system is as porous as Nokia. For the price of a blank EPROM cartridge and a connection cable, you can download any GBA game available, dump it to your cartridge and be playing the latest game within a few minutes. Compare this to buying an MMC Card and reader for your computer and the similarities are frightening. As is the price. It's just that the N-Gage has the reputation.
Piracy issues are never going to go away, and while the 'cease and desist' orders will continue to fly out to ISP's, a lot of people are wondering what Nokia can do to stop the flow. Don't forget that this is what the Internet is designed to do (namely copy a lot of information really quickly between two computers).
Yes there is a legal team out there trying to stop the flood of hosting sites, and if you feel chivalrous, you can report a warez site direct to Nokia on this link. But there’s more to the Internet than the Web, Yes there is copy protection on all the MMC Games so you can't just dump all your MMC Games onto one card (along with all your other games), but from a practical point of view, any copy protection system in the real world will be broken. Everyone realises these measures are more for the casual ‘will this work’ user, rather than the major hackers… it just holds them up a few days as opposed to a few hours.
While not exactly turning a blind eye to the problem, Nokia are now looking at their prime strategy of promoting the N-Gage having a knock on effect for the pirates. The number of games requiring the N-Gage Arena for the full game experience (Pathway to Glory and Pocket Kingdom are notable for this) have created an interesting situation for warez users. Because warez copies of the games don’t connect to the Arena, the extra functions (or in some cases possibly the core gameplay) aren’t accessible. Whether by engineering or accident, Nokia are using the warez gangs as nothing more as viral distribution of demo versions of their games. If they continue to push out official demos of games as they have with Pathway to Glory and Asphalt Urban GT then the casual user isn’t even going to have to worry about using warez to check out a game before buying it – they can use the official demo. Far easier for the user, much better for the N-Gage as a whole.
Nokia have acknowledged the piracy problem, they’ve taken a realistic look at how to defeat it, and how to turn it to their advantage. Good for them – they may not know the gaming marketplace, but they sure know human nature.
There are still a few issues that need addressed, and the main one is the leaking of beta copies. Nokia do have to promote the new games and that means a lot of early copies shipping out to the media long before the release date of the game. Invariably, these leak out. Nokia need to get a grip of this problem quickly. It shouldn’t be too difficult to add some code to track where the copy came from (a UID for each copy of the game). Perhaps authenticating the game through the Arena is a way forward.
The second is a bit more practical. Make sure it’s easier to find the games officially than unofficially, and price them realistically. Yes I know it sounds easy, and in a way it is. Nokia have already proven they can think outside the box one, can they do it again?