Angry Birds boss: Piracy helps us 'get more business'

fuck me.......

Finally somebody who subscribes to the argument that piracy can lead to actual sales and not every pirate item had is a lost sale.

Music/film companies must hate him right now.

Quite a refreshing attitude.......

I'm always pleased with how the angry birds twitter deals with fanmade stuff. People make angry birds everything, something most other media companies would shoot down, but Rovio highlight and congratulate homegrown use of their IP.

It also helps that the games are incredibly good value, and the updates just keep adding ridiculous amounts of levels. Thankfully EA only bought their publisher and nothing more, 'cos Rovio are doing almost everything right at the minute.

It's not piracy per se

It's not piracy per se that makes AB so popular, but there some are similar effects between piracy and the AB model -

1) It's cheap

Piracy is generally free, but even buying the AB app is pocket change.

2) It's so darn easy to get a hold of

Piracy is sometimes that much easier (and quicker) to get hold of something than buying it thru proper channels. AB (altho this holds true for all mobile apps) is just as easy (if not easier) to get from the "proper" channel than to pirate it - fire up your phones app store, a few clicks, enter your pass, fire the thing up.

If music/video was cheap enough that ppl thought "meh, what's £x? May as well get it" they'd get less profit per item, but would likely increase total sales substantially (compare 'berry app prices and sales with Apple app for example - who the hell pays £5 for a phone app?!)

Try before you buy would likely help too - taster apps with a few levels to get you into the game go a long way to giving ppl a reason to buy your app.

Piracy is just the symptom of bad customer service: http://www.shockandahh.com/2012/01/piracy-is-symptom-not-disease.html

Angry Birds has never (to my knowledge) been a game you go into a shop and buy. At least not initially.

It has been an online distributed game on app stores. Which just shows that the media industry needs to embrace online more in a more sensible fairer way.

These days who needs TV stations and Sky? why can't I just go on the website of a TV series production company and pay to view a TV show?

Just one problem

Some countries have structured their IP laws in such a way that if you turn a blind eye, then you risk losing control of the IP.

This could mean that angry birds goes into the public domain, which is probably not a desired situation.

The laws really need overhauled.

Not the same cup of tea

Angry birds is/was a fun and original concept that was interesting to play. It was free on Android and payable on iStore, even the wife bought and she is definately not a hard core gamer.

The major difference being that

A : It was original.

B : It was amusing.

C: It was free or very cheap.

D: it was available on almost all platforms.

E : I didnt feel cheated.

In my humble opinion the music industry is suffering because it has almost nothing substantial left to offer. They are churning out "pop stars", they are not producing musicians. Pop Stars with no apparent musical talent, their talent lies in their capacity to simply "produce" what the Music Company dictates.

Music companies dictate who they want to be succesfull but that dictatorship has no long lasting effect and thereby is a poor source of income. Rovio didn't/doesnt need to dictate, it is simply a good product at a good price.

The golden era is coming to an end for the major film and music companies. It is now time for the small and independants to surface and allow us access to where the real music/talent lies.

The unfortunate side is that if some music wasn't pirated we would never even know that it existed because the majors do not publically make it available. "They" have deemed it to be less interesting, read *profitable".

RIP....Simon Cowell....

Just an excuse...

"Some countries have structured their IP laws in such a way that if you turn a blind eye, then you risk losing control of the IP."

Some companies maintian an iron grip over their so-called IP, up to and including suing fans.. and want to use this kind of law as an excuse to divert blame away from themselves by saying they are required to do this. They are not.

These types of laws do have a purpose.. Firstly, to prevent an unscrupulous company from sitting on something for years, and by inaction allowing people to either assume this item is public domain or that they tactily approve use of it.. .then popping up after years and suing everyone. Secondly, to prevent a company from accumulating so much IP they can't even keep track of it all, so they didn't know they even had the rights to something. Companies do both, but at their peril.

In this case, they are NOT really turning a blind eye. In the case fan items, as Craig 12 says, they are interacting with their fans. They aren't charging a licensing fee, but they are effectively maintaing control by approving of the items produced.. since they are in close contact, they could say "no" to some or all items down the road. As for the Asian counterfeiters, they say it's not economical to go sue each and every one of them.. but at least this means they have stated their disapproval for this counterfeiting. Both avoid the main peril under the law of saying nothing at all, losing control by letting everyone assume tacit approval. In one case they give explicit approval, in the other they give explicit disapproval.

@ A J Stiles

"no longer able to get a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop, would gave gone out and bought something else instead. So all those pirate copies of Photoshop are hardly lost sales for Adobe "

So if they can't get it for free they won't take it at all. That *is* a sale lost to piracy, lackwit. What's that? They could at least match other peoples' prices? Why, if people will pay the higher price? That's just business, my friend. Mom&Pop couldn't get a break into the market? Tough. Business again. Uncompetitive companies deserve to go under, as the sentiment towards, for example ISPs goes on these pages. If customers don't shop around they deserve to pay what they're willing to for what they want (whether it's what they need, the most economical choice or whatever.) Anr what's with the Fred in the Shed crap? Some kind of smug condescension? Pathetic.

"In my humble opinion the music industry is suffering because it has almost nothing substantial left to offer. They are churning out "pop stars", they are not producing musicians. Pop Stars with no apparent musical talent, their talent lies in their capacity to simply "produce" what the Music Company dictates."

Yup. The big problems of late:

1) Autotune. Used subtly, it's pretty unnoticeable. But that's not how it's used any more. Now, there's simply no concern if the artist can hit a note or not, they just crank up the autotune and let it warp the singers voice by an octave or so. This sounds downright bad,. (Note, I'm not counting songs where Autotune is *intentionally* cranked to make the singer sound like a robot., I don't like the sound of that either but that's a special effect)

2) Artist selection by computer. Yes, I read about this years ago, the main record labels throw their existing artists albums (and slaes figures) into a computer, then when they scout *new* bands they feed THAT music into the computer, and just pick out whoever the computer says will have highest sales based on it's model. And you wonder why so many bands sound so similar these days? 8-)

3) Irrelevancy. I've spoken with a few local bands. None had a dream of signing up with some big record company. Firstly, they knew the record co would screw them over. Secondly, they can put up and sell MP3s themselves, and get their own runs of CDs to sell too. Thirdly, in general when a band goes on tour the record co doesn't have anything to do with that either.

Games industry view?

From passing knowledge of the games industry, having family who are game developers and various friends who work in the industry anecdotally this attitude is more common. Most of the games providers don't necessarily see a pirated copy as a lost sale.

Genuine (non pirates) by the console, and buy games, trade games and swap games. Pirates don't do that. In many cases the pirates wouldn't have bought the console if the games couldn't have been pirated. So there is no increase in sales, or decrease really its the same as it would have been.

By focusing on the paying customer, providing better service, better quality, addons for online play etc etc. The pirates get very little and are not much of a drain. The blockbuster games regularly outsell their film counterparts. As far as I can tell almost every console at some point has had its copy protection broken, with more consoles going online and pirate copies not working in multiplayer environments it all gets to be a crappy experience for the copyright infringer.

The music industry still thinks it can treat us mean and keep us kean. When in fact both the music and film industry have treated us mean, and been told to fuck off. The prevalence of those "don't pirate me" videos in the cinema seems to have dropped. HELLO - you're advertising to the paying consumer and treating us like criminals. More music providers are dropping DRM. Yet the big establish content publishers still don't get it. They are not losing money to pirates, they are losing it to the competition for not giving people what they want. Hopefully we'll see their complete demise soon. They are the dinosaurs, and the asteroid is coming.

they're not kidding...

They're not kidding about the unauthorized merchandise. We gave out Angry Birds lai si this year, bought from a store in tai kok tsui which also sells Angry Birds-emblazoned versions of just about everything you can possibly make out of plastic for less than $10. Pretty sure they haven't got an official license...:)

Piracy is wrong

I know there are a lot of tight asses out there that want to promote the idea that piracy is ok but it's not. Sure piracy up until now hasn't really been a problem but if everyone takes a "piracy is awesome" attitude then where is the incentive to pay? Once the majoirty of your user base pirates then you're fucked.

Piracy is only ok when most people pay which you won't get if you just consider it aacceptable to pirate. Otherwise the shareware model wouldn't have died.

Piracy can help some but like anything else there is no one size fits all model so just because it worked for AB doesn't mean squat for others.

Angry birds?

Had a go on a work colleague's phone, as I was idly curious as to the number of self-confessed AB addicts around me. Played it for about 5 minutes [if that!] before I got bored. Similar experience with FacePuke —setup an account to see what the addiction was and spent a few hours on there, spread over several weeks, before de-activating my account through the sheer fuckwitted idiocy of it all.

I think I should hire myself out as a marketing consultant. If I think your idea stinks, you've got a guaranteed winner on your hands!

Grateful Dead

"Grateful Dead - A band that went bankrupt and disappeared in the early 70's after they encouraged their fans to copy and swap recording of the bands work"

Rly?

As any Deadhead kno, they finally threw in the towel in 1995 after the death of their lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia.

They did indeed encourage their fans to record their music - setting aside areas at their concerts for that specific purpose. The result was that bootleg Dead albums became immediately worthless and commercially released albums continued to sell very well indeed. As did concert tickets which, given the fact that the band were legendary for their live playing (and thoroughly enjoyed playing live), meant that the band suffered financially not one jot from "piracy".

An interesting paradigm....

Most digital content companies...

Would rather have 1000 customers paying £100 each than 1,000,000 customers paying £1 each. Some execs are realising that freely distributable digital content leads to much greater exposure and familiarity, naturally leading to greater market penetration and secondary revenue streams. Familiarity also gets some higher value products into the hands of up and coming professionals who will soon decide which solution they prefer (e.g. photoshop). Alternatively you can continually try and piss off your potential consumers until they go elsewhere...

"Piracy" should in many instances be looked on as an alternative marketing strategy - the cost saving in marketing alone is probably not to be sniffed at (compared to traditional methods of getting people to know about/familiar with your product)