Angry Birds boss: ‘Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business’
Rovio's Mikael Hed tells music industry audience that embracing pirates can attract new fans — Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry's mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games …
Context & Ripple Effects
Rovio’s breakout had already been built on mobile distribution: its CEO credited Apple in March 2011, and by October the company had paired more than 400 million downloads with a confirmed Angry Birds movie. That scale makes Mikael Hed’s argument less a defence of infringement than a statement that reach can have strategic value.
The remarks also travelled across a broad set of technology outlets on January 30, showing that Rovio’s approach to piracy was being treated as a notable business-model position rather than a narrow game-industry dispute.
First-order effects
- Rovio publicly frames unauthorized Angry Birds copies as a potential fan-acquisition channel, putting audience growth alongside lost sales in how it evaluates piracy.
- The position supports Rovio’s effort to turn a game with a mass download base into a broader entertainment property, alongside the already-confirmed film.
Second-order effects
- Other mobile-game publishers face a sharper choice between spending on anti-piracy enforcement and treating broad distribution as a route to brand awareness and later monetization.
- For Rovio, the value of each additional Angry Birds user extends beyond an app transaction when that audience can support characters, updates and the planned film.
Third-order effects
- If publishers can monetize attention across games and entertainment, mobile-game strategy shifts from protecting each copy to building franchises around large installed audiences.
- Piracy debates in digital entertainment may increasingly turn on whether a company has complementary products and channels that convert awareness into revenue, rather than on copy control alone.
The trend: Rovio’s stance is one data point in the shift from selling isolated mobile downloads toward using games to build cross-media consumer franchises.