Pigs are still notably unpopular, but Rovio’s CEO is notably not fussed by dodgy Chinese counterfeiters producing fake Angry Birds gear.
It’s pretty inevitable in technology that if you produce something, within mere nanoseconds there’ll be a cheaper, generally less well produced Chinese knockoff flying off the factory lines available too. The incredible success of Angry Birds made it a rather obvious target, and for some time now you’ve been able to buy unauthorised T-Shirts, soft toys, plastic figures — you name it, it probably exists with a pissed-off robin painted on the front of it.
Most companies spend time and money suing the counterfeiters where possible, but not Rovio’s CEO Peter Vesterbacka. He attended the Disrupt conference in Beijing and made the following interesting statement regarding all the knockoff Angry Birds merchandise out there:
There are a lot of Angry Birds products out there, but most of them aren’t officially licensed. Angry Birds is now the most copied brand in China, and we get a lot of inspiration from local producers. The way we look at it is, of course we want to sell the officially licensed, good quality products, but at the same time we have to be happy about the fact that the brand is so loved that it is the most copied brand in China.
Fascinating strategy there — essentially an adoption of the position that pirates wouldn’t pay anyway, I guess. [Techdirt]