PapayaMobile: Publishers relying on "most vulnerable piece of the puzzle"

In a recent interview PapayaMobile evangelist Oscar Clark has shared his views on the growing Asian markets, and explained that traditional publishers are missing its potential, because they're putting the value on easily pirated content.

"A premium model is basically putting all the value in the asset that's most easily distributed," said Clark in an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

"Obviously there's lots of complaints in the console world about piracy and there are great laws in China to deal with protecting trademarks, it's just that there is still an issue with copycat content. And enforcing that is problematic."

He believes that the secret to overcoming that for the traditional publishers is to put the value in the server side of the business, in social networks, much like the free-to-play games currently dominating online and mobile.

"The beauty of games is that actually we can do that, because we can build server side connections. And the beauty of social is that we give you a reason to want to spend money, because they can show off to their friends. And that puts all the value not in the thing that's easily distributed, but in the thing that's really hard, the central server."

But he also recognised that such changes would require a massive change of strategy from AAA publishers.

"The issue is if you come from a market where it's all about the Blu-ray disc, of course it's going to take you time to work out how to make value from the Chinese market, because you put your value in the most vulnerable piece of the puzzle," he explained.

"Put the service at the heart of the experience, and that changes everything. And I think that's why PlayStation Home is so much fun, because it was great being at that edge of console that was trying this new way of thinking. And hopefully we'll see a lot more of it."