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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."'"
Rovio Mobile indicted for taking part in the Mega Upload conspiracy.
Piracy is one of the greatest forms of advertising. In some businesses, it's called "word of mouth". Growing up, many of the products I was introduced to, and subsequently became loyal customers of, was thanks to "piracy" of one sort or another. Back then, nobody saw it as a bad thing. The rule of thumb was copy all that you want as long as you don't try to make a profit from it or pass it off as your own.
When I was younger and still listened to mainstream music, my favorite band was Metallica. I heard them on the radio a few times, but I didn't know who they were. That is, until one of my friends loaned me a cassette tape. Then, a series of them. I was hooked. I bought every CD I could find (even though I already had the tapes), and I tuned into every radio station that played them. From what I understand, they owe a lot of their success to piracy. It's a shame that they attacked Napster. By the way, has anybody heard anything from them lately? I wonder how their anti-piracy campaign is working?
It wasn't just music. Everything from software and video games to free food came along my way, and I often rewarded the company with my business. I was always more loyal to companies that treated me like I was a prize to be one, and not a resource to be manipulated. I hope that the media companies realize this before we lose too many of our rights. As for me, I've already given up on them.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
We took something from the music industry
Incoming lawsuit?
...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
Paulo Coelho would tend to agree with them, even taking it a step further. He's joined up with Pirate Bay as part of an arts promotion program.
My friend downloaded a cracked and pirated copy of angry birds, and he liked it so much (as did his wife) that they both purchased the full copy of the game. He sent it to me, and I purchased it also (having tried the free version and went Meh...) but probably would not have, had I not gotten a chance to see all of the levels, and really appreciate the game!
Probably 75 percent of the games that I have ever purchased, I have played a pirated version first not the demo. Especially when you can get all of the levels or vehicles unlocked and use all of the different weapons and just give it a good run through to be sure it's really worth having.
If it's not worth buying, it's not worth keeping the pirated version around either!
Cheers:)
Even though they would probably never admit it, IMHO this is how Windows and MS Office got so popular.
I do not believe MS would not be able to come with a better way of protecting against illegal copying. It is just that allowing people to copy windows without much effort created a very nice near-monopoly on OS for them.
... 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 !
I really wanted to watch Van Helsing the other day. I just wanted to watch it, not own it. I've recently had a cleanse and sold all my DVDs to a second hand store, only keeping my wild life documentary Blu-Rays as I got a bit fed up with having hundreds of DVDs cluttering up the flat.
After scouting around, on Amazon it is about £8 for the Van Helsing Blu-Ray, on iTunes it is about £8 to buy/download forever Van Helsing.
I'm not a fan of buying movies to keep like that, I just wanted to watch it once, not keep it on a HDD for the rest of my life, i figured to me it's worth £1 to download/stream and view once.
Lovefilms do PPV at £3.49 for most films, Van Helsing wasn't available and that's more than I wanted to pay anyway. They also do unlimited streaming for £5pm.
Netflix do unlimited streaming for £6pm but their site didn't seem to show Van Helsing and there wasn't a one off option.
iTunes only lets you buy, not one off stream and that's the same price as the Blu-Ray.
BitTorrent on the other hand had it readily available for free, but I don't pirate so watched my copy of Planet Earth instead.
Am I unreasonable in wanting to watch once an 8 year old film that had a budget of $160 million and broke $300 million in the box office for £1?
Is it unreasonable to not want to pay monthly subscriptions to a service that doesn't have the film I want to watch anyway which forces me to watch more films than I want in order to get value for my money?
Is it me that's broken, or their business model?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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?
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....
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
you know, if you'd just pirate your movies like a normal person you wouldn't have to see all those silly "you wouldn't steal a car" ads at the start, and then you probably wouldn't think that stealing a car is the same thing as pirating software.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
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.