Western mobile game developers who want to succeed in China face an all-too common challenge: Rampant piracy of their titles by unscrupulous copycats and pirates, often abetted by Chinese app stores, which sometimes aren’t even aware they’re distributing pirated versions of official apps. As a publisher of Western mobile games in China, we hear a lot of stories from Western game developers who helplessly watch as knockoffs of their top games attract millions of downloads here.

To illustrate all this, let me tell you about the troubles that one leading Western game developer has been having in China: The company discovered that pirated versions of their top games were rife on many of the Android app store in China, with over 190 different pirated versions of their top five titles getting millions of illegal downloads. They spent months contacting these stores about removing pirated copies of their games, but to no avail.

But while China Android Smart Phone bandits were busy profiting off Western game titles, our team at Yodo1 has been putting together a posse to help tame the Chinese smartphone gaming frontier, with the help of some leading Western game developers. Armed with a letter of authorization from our game developer partners in one hand, and cease-and-desist letter from our local lawyers holstered in our back pocket, we ventured out to contact every major Android app store in the Chinese market.

Western game developers can’t police all China’s app stores by themselves: With hundreds of app stores operating in China, it’s almost impossible for a Western developer to monitor and control their IP rights across the country. A Western developer can ask one of them to remove pirated copies of their games, but the store owner knows his competitors will still carry them. That’s a big disincentive to comply.

Typically, we ask app stores to switch out the knockoff copies with our developer partners’ legitimate versions. Now the fans of the pirated game get a totally functional, Chinese version of the official game, while the app stores get a better game to distribute.

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