Why mobile games firms should be scared of Rapidshare

Ever heard of Rapidshare? If not, you should maybe make finding out about it one of your New Year's resolutions for 2009.

It's a file-hosting site that's estimated to be the twelfth biggest site in the world in terms of traffic, with millions of files uploaded by users to store on its servers.

It, and the increasing number of sites like it, are also the latest hotbed of online piracy. Here's how it works: people upload big files - music or movies for example - which can then be downloaded by anyone entering the correct URL in their web browser.

There are hundreds of blogs springing up to publicise these URLs, again mainly focused on music and movies. And the threat is that while traditional file-sharing has focused on downloading individual tracks or TV shows, file-hosting sites support much bigger files.

In other words, forget downloading some Beatles tracks - you can download the band's entire discography in a single .zip or .rar file.

What does all this have to do with mobile games, you may be wondering? Well, you can get a 410MB collection of Gameloft mobile games on a Rapidshare link we found today, and similar collections focused on EA Mobile, N-Gage and cracked iPhone games.

Finding them is easy for anyone with the ability to use Google, too, even if they don't know the specific blogs that publish these links.

Piracy isn't often talked about much in the mobile games industry, but something tells us that may change in 2009, particularly as the growth of smartphones leads more mobile gamers to be comfortable sideloading content onto their handsets from PCs.