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Angry Birds Boss Credits Piracy For Popularity Boost
An anonymous reader writes "Mikael Hed is the CEO of Rovio Mobile, the company behind popular mobile puzzle game Angry Birds. At the Midem conference Monday, Hed had some interesting things to say about how piracy has affected the gaming industry, and Rovio's games in particular: '"We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy." Hed explained that Rovio sees it as "futile" to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans. When that's not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. "Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day." ... "We took something from the music industry, which was to stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans. We do that today: we talk about how many fans we have," he said. "If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow."'"
...Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans.
Because Rovio brought us the first of this wonderful concept of projectile-tower crushing. No ripping off there. Never been done. Glad people pay for it. **puts on old and bitter smug-cap, goes back to Crush the Castle 3**
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
It is.
Once you enter the professional world (e.g. get a job in that business) you become part of the decision process on which software the company should purchase. Since you will have already gathered experience in photoshop, the company might be more inclined to go with that instead of GIMP.
Simalarly, it is easier to find people with the relevant skills. E.g. if it becomes hard to find people with photoshop skills, the business which change their applications, so that it is easier to find people with the correct skillset.
So you see, it does benefit them in one way or another.
... he would be filthy rich - and his offspring will be forever filthy rich as well, thanks to our "perpetual copyright laws"
Unfortunately, he ain't
That is why Beethoven died dirt poor
But on the other hand, the world is far more richer because no one could monopolize the wonderful music of Beethoven
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Could you please explain how you stole a car without the owner losing it?
You know, like the digital copies this article is about.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Once his company goes public, and the stock price takes a tiny little dip, suddenly at the next investors meeting it becomes "Piracy is the devil's works!"
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If your customers aren't buying your products, please stop whining about customer behaviour and change your products to suit the market.
If your business model doesn't make money in the market you've chosen, please stop whining about the market and change your business model.
So what Rovio is supporting is market conditions that favour their particular product, which is very different from market conditions that ensure a robust and healthy competitive environment, or that ensure innovation and development.
The market is fixed. Your business model and product is flexible (or should be). So change your product so it suits the market conditions.
Rovio understood that the market they chose to operate in has a large amount of piracy. Instead of trying to change the market to suit their products, they chose the eminently more profitable option of working out how they could make piracy work for them. As you've pointed out, one of the ways they did this was by launching merch to go with their game that allowed them to take advantage of the fanbase generated by pirate players. As another poster pointed out, the game they created is not unique and the Castle version doesn't have the merch potential, which is possibly why Angry Birds made a lot more money from the same game.
Pirating software is going to happen regardless of any action you take. It's a fact of life in the market. So you can choose to view pirated copies as lost sales and let your business plan get broken by it, or you can choose to view it as free marketing and incorporate it into your business plan.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
I'm a hobby developer for WP7 with 2 of my friends. The first thing we do on every release is upload our app to various torrent sites and seed the hell out of it.
If someone has jailbroken their phone and is capable of and interested in finding, downloading and installing a pirated app on their phone, they are lost revenue for us anyway.
Our only hope of revenue from these users is to provide them with good enough app so that they keep using it and might buy it (and advertise the app within their circle of friends, who might not be competent enough to pirate the app)
If it is easier to buy the app on appstore than to pirate it, then pirates are good for you
I can't say for sure that we wouldn't have made it without piracy, but currently we have 5 simple apps out and with total cost of 2000$ for launch advertising (and "free" work for 2-3 weeks at nights, after our daily jobs) per app, we gross around 6500$ every month
Since we seed our apps ourselves, we see that approximately 20% of installations are pirated (~2000 torrent downloads vs ~10000 sales via store every month) but we are sure that without the 20% "lost" sales, we wouldn't make the top charts of legal downloads... ever....
Desperate for cash seems to be the standard business model these days though.
They can have billions, but they're still desperate for more.
This space available.
And of course, with our luck it happens to be the one who produces shit as a product.
What precisely is wrong with Angry Birds as a game? (Other than the fact that it is popular and therefore non-1337, and is played by people who aren't "gamers" on machines that don't require $1000 graphics cards).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think you're saying more or less what the summary says:
See:
"Hed explained that Rovio sees it as "futile" to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans."
and
" When that's not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. "Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.""
Your point is obvious - piracy doesn't make you money. On the other hand, piracy can lead to a growing customer base. The point Hed is making is more that suing customers is more likely to lead to reducing your customer base rather than growing it. This is perhaps particularly applicable when it comes to small games like Angry Birds where there is money to be made off of merchandising.
In Rovio's case, as you seem to inadvertently point out, Rovio makes money both on the sale of the game and on the generated advertising revenue. If people pirate the game, they still make the advertising revenue.
Wrapped up in this is the idea that Rovio's business model doesn't just depend on game sales, but also on advertising revenue and merchandising. This should be obvious as Angry Birds is free on Android anyway.
I think what they recognize is that for their particular product, there is a large portion of users who would not pay for the game. The choice for them is play the game for free or don't play it at all - they might as well have these users playing the game and generating hype than going and playing some other game and making it popular instead.