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Rovio Positive About Piracy

[Jan 31, 2012, 11:48 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

An interview on guardian.co.uk talks with Rovio's Mikael Hed about the flyaway success of Angry Birds (thanks Ant via Neatorama). This includes the company's take on how piracy may help them:

"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."

According to Hed, Rovio has taken some more positive lessons from the music industry, including how it sees its customers.

"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."

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25.

Re: Rovio Positive About Piracy

Jan 31, 2012, 19:56

jdreyer

Beamer wrote on Jan 31, 2012, 17:12:
One of the big reasons you hear people defend their piracy is "I wanted to make sure it ran on my system" or "I wanted to make sure I liked it." They don't see a reason to wait until a sale.

I kind of dig the idea of a limited time Steam return, or even better, a limited time trial, but it couldn't really work: people would be very quick to find a way to use offline mode to get the full game for free. But when Gaiku becomes a more valid delivery method it will be perfect. Since it's all server-side they can be foolproof about only letting a user play 2 hours or whathaveyou. You still don't know how it runs on your system, but at least you have a solid feel for what's going on.

Yeah, but isn't that what demos are for?




Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

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