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Rovio to Cut 260 Jobs as the Angry Birds Franchise Becomes Irrelevant

109 points by vvvv 11y ago

imauld 11y ago
> There is one last hope for Rovio — The Angry Birds Movie. Dear god why?
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  That was my initial response to The LEGO Movie, which wound up being one of the best movies of the year. It'll all depend on the team behind it.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    When I saw that The LEGO Movie had not even been nominated for the Academy Award for best animated picture, I immediately stopped the recording of the awards show, and deleted it from my DVR. The decision to buy the DVD was absolutely effortless. With respect to the team behind the Angry Birds movie, they're using Sony Pictures. On the one hand, they have a couple Aardman releases and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. But on the other, they have The Smurfs.
    - km3k 11y ago
      The Smurfs was a bad movie, but did well with young children, which is exactly who a lot of the Angry Birds memorabilia targets.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Kids, that's why.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
If game shops operate as movie studios, why don't they simply hire people temporarily. Movie studios cut their staff to marketing, sales, and licensing once their work is completed and released.
- corysama 11y ago
  Game shop operators have wanted to do that for a long time. The challenge has been that ramping up at a game studio has been a much longer process than ramping up on a movie project. The tools, skills and processes are a lot more consistent between movies than they are between games. It often takes working through a whole game to figure out how to be really effective at a particular studio. In practice, game shops that grow and shrink rapidly have found it to be more expensive than just holding on to the staff. This also has made outsourcing difficult and limited in games. The situation is changing slowly as the industry converges on a small number of standardized game engines. Knowing Unity or Unreal makes you easy to hire at a lot of places. But, if everyone knows Unity or Unreal, it also makes you easy to replace.
  - lentil_soup 11y ago
    It's also very bad for employees when there are not many other companies around. It works for the movie industry because they have hubs (ie. Hollywood) where you have loads of studios so you can jump between productions without having to move. It's not the same in the games industry.
  - justinhj 11y ago
    Even when using Unity and Unreal the ramp up time is still significant since we all use different source control, bug tracking and project management software. We also build large complicated systems on top of the game engine which come with their own terminology and best practises. Then there's the different back end and external APIs and libraries. I agree the situation is better now and getting better.
- thrillgore 11y ago
  Already happening. Firms like Compucom and Blindlight specifically handle the outsourcing/temporary hiring of QA and other staff. Some studios like Behavior Interactive exist as consultants/infill for game development. Experience with Unity/Unreal and even Blender are something a lot of creative and technical staffing agencies are hiring for.
josho 11y ago
The key lesson here is that entertainment companies are closer to gambling than outsiders realize. That is, to turn an entertainment company into a viable long term business you need to diversify and reduce risk of new title launches. That's why we see the large game companies producing sequels as opposed to launching new IP or game concepts. A mobile company that understands this model is tell tale games.
jdlyga 11y ago
Well, from a game perspective, Angry Birds 2 is pretty good. It gets rid of a lot of the annoyances in the first series of games. It's much easier to knock down small parts of buildings now.
jdlyga 11y ago
Well, from a game perspective, Angry Birds 2 is pretty good. It gets rid of a lot of the annoyances in the first series of games. It's much easier to knock down small parts of buildings now.
autobahn 11y ago
Brings up an interesting thought exercise. Let's say you do start a small mobile game company and your game blows up into a cultural phenomena like Angry Birds. And like all of these things, you know that one day in the indeterminate future, that phenomena will fade, much like Angry Birds has. How do you best handle this? Do you sell early and get out quickly? Do you try to build something larger out of the resources you now have? I'd be tempted to cash out early and just enjoy the fruits of my success.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  The thing that indie devs don't recognize about gaming is that it's a hits business, just like film and music. _Success of your franchise is not an endorsement_. People consume hits and toss them away for the next big thing all the time. The reasons independent game companies make these mistakes is that they conflate the mass appeal of their creation with a personal endorsement and assume anything they do in the future will be well-received. That's rarely the case. To be a successful player in the hits business, you have to be putting out new, formulaic stuff constantly, aware that some percentage of it will never make back its money, some may break even, and some will make a lot of money. This is what movie studios, record companies, and the successful game conglomerates do. As much as it may get tiresome to see the bi-annual CoD release break records, it matches the expected behavior perfectly. But I digress. The direct answer to your question is pretty similar to what it always is: don't grow too fast, don't let it go to your head, and diversify. Personally, if I was in that situation, I think selling out to Activision or EA, who already have a functional hits apparatus, would be a path warranting serious consideration. A lot of game developers are eventually forced into that position anyway after they make the erroneous assumptions discussed in this comment and become financially distressed.
  - the_af 11y ago
    What do you mean, indie devs don't recognize this? Maybe some (or many!) of them do, but aren't interested in "putting out new, formulaic stuff constantly". Some indie devs may be trying to get acquired by Activision or EA, the kind of indies who would grow to have 800 employees, and some may just be trying to do their thing in an environment that allows them to explore different gameplay and/or artistic choices. Not everyone's goal must be necessarily to sell thousands of copies at whatever personal cost.
larrik 11y ago
The article paints Angry Birds 2 as a paid app losing out to freemium apps, but when I downloaded it, it was a free app with way too many freemium parts. I deleted it shortly after, as I'm not interested in freemium mobile apps.
- distances 11y ago
  Not really, the article quite clearly says "... and its freemium model doesn’t seem to be working great." At the end the article mentions the game wasn't designed with the current freemium model in mind (since the first iteration was pay-to-install), maybe that threw you off?
  - larrik 11y ago
    Very well could have
minimaxir 11y ago
The important chart missed is the Grossing rank for Angry Birds 2, which has been hovering at about #50 grossing since launch. It was not going to be a megasuccess like the first Angry Birds, or even a low-tier modern freemium title. (for reference, Fallout Shelter, a game that was highly experimental for Bethesda, is currently at #32 overall Grossing) It probably doesn't help that there have been more than 5 Angry Birds games already and people are sick of the gameplay. I'll give Rovio credit for trying to diversify from physics based games (Fight, Epic, Stella, Rovio Stars, etc.).
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  This is very important. I would also argue that Rovio never really achieved the "Freemium ideal" in the way that top grossing games: Clash of Clans, Game of War, and Candy Crush has. Now are other examples in the reverse, where the game is far too expensive to attract a large userbase. But Rovio hasn't been able to "toe the line" between an attractive "free-to-wait" game that is fun enough to draw in massive amounts of paying users - like other developers have - _despite_ having a brand marketable enough to make a movie off of.
bjacobel 11y ago
Was it ever relevant? Popular, sure. But relevant?
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Angry Birds was the franchise that a) first proved that you could make a media empire from a single app and b) you can sell apps for $0.99 and still get mega-rich. Incidentally, b) is no longer the case.
- jonnathanson 11y ago
  How are you distinguishing between the two? Relevancy is a relative quality. We don't say that something simply is or is not "relevant." It needs to be relevant in relation to something else. Usually some standard or topic. Recency and popular culture are common guideposts to which we peg relevancy. If we choose to peg relevancy to 'current pop culture,' then we could say Angry Birds is less relevant today than it used to be in its prime. And we'd probably say that Angry Birds was quite relevant in its prime, being the premiere game in the breakthrough period of mainstream mobile gaming. If we choose to peg relevancy to an industry standard -- say, 'current best practices in the gaming business' -- then we reach a similar conclusion. Angry Birds was hyperrelevant in its heyday, but less so today.
  - braythwayt 11y ago
    Relevance is measured by influence, popularity by reach at one moment in time. Lots of boy bands are popular, but very few are relevant. I’m not saying that Angry Birds is or isn’t relevant, but there is a distinction between the two ideas that is fairly easy to observe in the wild.
    - dpark 11y ago
      > Lots of boy bands are popular, but very few are relevant. Relevant to what? Relevant to their fans? Obviously. Relevant to the economy? Probably, since popular boy bands would have a great deal of influence over a lot of spenders. Relevant to culture? Definitely. A popular anything impacts culture. Popularity pretty much implies some sort of relevance.
tcbawo 11y ago
Rovio seemed to be building a content distribution network within their apps (toons.tv). I was somewhat surprised they didn't move further into that direction. They had the brand and merchandising, just not enough personality to create a Loony Toons-like experience.
tfandango 11y ago
I'm not surprised, they have been cranking out the same game over and over again, re-branded and/or adding slightly different abilities without changing the basic game. After playing the Star Wars version for a little while I deleted it because the concept (while initially fun and interesting) had gotten old. They did release something called "Bad Piggies" too which I thought was a fun different game but along the same theme but that didn't seem to take off.
- phn 11y ago
  They also tried publishing different games, Amazing Alex for example. The truth is, for such simple things and for this definition of "success" (i.e. being the global hit of the moment) there is no formula. For a comparison, look at King, what success do they have outside of candy crush? And it's not for the lack of games as they have quite a few.
  - chkuendig 11y ago
    As a counter-example, Supercell is extremely successful with Hay Day and Boom Beach besides Clash of Clans. Maybe it isn't all just luck.
    - phn 11y ago
      It isn't all luck, but they spend a HUGE amount of money to keep the ad ball rolling. And I may be being unfair not having played their games, but they follow the same mechanic, just being different themed, right? It is too early to be sure, but I'd bet they're still riding their particular wave.
      - ido 11y ago
        BoomBeach is the same genre as CoC but it's not a clone - it has quite a few changes in it (maybe an appropriate analogy would be C&C compared to Dune2, or Quake compared to Doom).
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
prawn 11y ago
Don't large game companies frequently shed staff after a large title has been released?
- minimaxir 11y ago
  They shed staff because they usually hire on extra staff (Art/QA) to meet deadlines. Mobile game development does not have that dynamic. The press release (http://rovio.fi/en/news/press-releases/696/rovio-sharpens-focus-on-core-businesses http://rovio.fi/en/news/press-releases/696/rovio-sharpens-fo...) explicitly says it's a cash flow issue.
zaphar 11y ago
Sounds like a case of too many eggs in one basket. Why didn't they diversify more into the micro transaction space with a different game I wonder?
- SyneRyder 11y ago
  I think they did try that - I loved the Rovio game Retry, which was a tiny plane flying through a Sonic-The-Hedgehog-like world, with a Flappy Bird mechanic and a retro 80s synthpop aesthetic: http://www.rovio.com/en/our-work/games/view/71/retry http://www.rovio.com/en/our-work/games/view/71/retry Levels were split into checkpoints (ala Sonic), and you could save your place at a checkpoint by either watching a video ad, spending a coin (collected in game or bought with real money), or you could fly on and get a bonus for completing a level without any saved checkpoints. I'm not much of a gamer, but I've apparently spent nearly 15 hours playing Retry (yikes).
- minimaxir 11y ago
  They certainly tried with Angry Birds Fight! (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-fight!/id933958078?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-fight!/id9339580...) and Angry Birds GO! (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-go!/id642821482?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-go!/id642821482?...) A few of the more recent physics games had strong freemium mechanics, like Angry Birds Transformers (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-transformers/id869231055?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-transformers/id8...) as well.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cwyers 11y ago
    My favorite Rovio spin-off of the Angry Birds franchise was Bad Piggies, sort of an Incredible Machines take on the physics game, where you had to build a contraption to complete the level objectives. So yeah, they certainly tried.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
rocky1138 11y ago
This is such an assumptive title. Angry Birds is still very popular with children. This is like saying that Mario is no longer relevant because Super Mario Galaxy sold less than New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It makes me wonder if TechCrunch has a stake in seeing Rovio fail when I read clickbaity headlines like this.
- abluecloud 11y ago
  When you make 260 employees redundant, I'd say it's ok for people to make assumptions about your brand.
  - sillygeese 11y ago
    It's even heftier percentage-wise.
0x0 11y ago
I tried Angry Birds 2 and was super impressed by the production quality and butter smooth graphics. Too bad the entire gameplay is a 100% miss: You have to wait or pay to retry levels after a while. This goes completely against everything that defines angry birds gameplay, which for me is to instantly re-start the level if I'm not satisfied with the first bird shoot. Absolutely ruins it. I'd much rather pay $X upfront for unlimited gameplay. Now it just feels like they're trying to cheat me out of real money every 15 minutes feeding some kind of virtual slot machine. :(
- zajd 11y ago
  The scoring system also makes absolutely no sense and removes any incentives to pay attention to the leaderboard
- ma2rten 11y ago
  Forcing the player to wait (or pay if they don't want to wait) has been proven to work well over and over again by numerous games.
  - bpicolo 11y ago
    Proven as a good user experience: no. Proven to suck money out of people: yes.
    - ma2rten 11y ago
      I have a number of friends who play candy crush and before that I had number of friends who play farmville. If you ask them they will say they having fun playing those games.
      - bpicolo 11y ago
        And? Do you think it would be less fun for them if microtransactions were absent? Doubt it.
        11y ago
enlightenedfool 11y ago
800 employees for this game? Why?
- chrisdbaldwin 11y ago
  Hubris, mostly.
dharma1 11y ago
My 5yo son still plays some of the Angry Birds games on iPad (we have them all) and I was impressed with the production values of Angry Birds 2. 800 employees and offices in 9 countries sounds like a lot though, hopefully slimming down and releasing some new games will keep them going. Movie - remains to be seen, but I've watched countless AB cartoons with my son and I'm not sure there is enough depth/meat in the characters, they don't really have personalities or even names you remember. Rovio has ambitions to be the next Disney but you really need memorable/interesting characters for that.
josu 11y ago
We need Uber for software developers. The gaming industry is looking more and more like the movie industry. Long term contracts no longer make sense. The industry needs to adapt.
- yuliyp 11y ago
  Ummm what? Part of the whole point of making companies is because individuals can't risk going bankrupt to make a game, while a corporation that takes investments from people who understand that they may lose money on the deal shifts the risk to those more able to take that risk on. Uber works because the number of cab fares is large enough that over non-tiny durations the risk averages out and makes the situation tenable for the drivers. When you deal with programmers. Or were you thinking of something like freelancing sites like rentacoder? The internet means that those basically provide work to people with spare time or in developing countries, not first-world countries.
  - josu 11y ago
    Maybe using the Uber analogy was a mistake. I used the analogy because I wasn't exactly thinking exactly about rentacoder kind of place, I was referring to something more curated, where work is somewhat commoditized. But I was also thinking of the relationships that actors and crew have with movies, or private contractors with projects. In my view, which admittedly is not that well informed, hiring and firing people à la Rovio or Zynga, based on market trends is a very inefficient way to manage your workfoce. If Rovio stumbles upon another hit, they will probably need all those workers back.
- nols 11y ago
  Like Upwork (formerly Elance and Odesk)? Hiring contractors instead of employees isn't that uncommon, and now we're even seeing the startup studio become more popular as a business model.
listic 11y ago
I never understood the appeal of the original game; it was just not interesting for me to fire birds to destroy ever more elaborate pigs' structures. I found Tiny Wings to be a much more pleasant game about birds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Wings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Wings Maybe I am just less angry than most people? It would be nice to not lose touch with the other people if I hope to make something with mass appeal some day.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wnevets 11y ago
Quite frankly they shouldn't of been as popular as they were. They stole gameplay from existing flash games and threw an "angry bird" skin on it.
caligastia 11y ago
When the first game came out, it was written in Lua and they had embedded a runtime in the iOS application - interesting that Apple at first forbade that practice, to the point of scanning libraries for interpreters. It then became the #1 iOS game - goes to show, allowing companies to bring their own language to the platform allows for unexpected successes. Hopefully Apple learned from that lesson. All the same, 800 employees for a game seems excessive, but then we have 5000 employees at Facebook for a website..
- serve_yay 11y ago
  The only lesson Apple seems to have learned is that the App Store is great, and everything they're doing is working gangbusters.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  > Facebook for a website.. That might be the greatest understatement I've seen for a while. It's technically true but it really doesn't paint any kind of picture. Facebook is a website in the same way that the Library of Congress is a 'place that stores stuff'. I'm not a huge fan of Facebook as a company but I admire the engineering talent that goes into dealing with 1.5 billion active monthly users, the incredible problems of adding even tiny features at that kind of scale.
chkuendig 11y ago
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rovio-entertainment-ltd/id298910979 https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rovio-entertainment-ltd/i... Maybe we reached peak Angry Birds...

109 points by vvvv 11y ago

imauld 11y ago

> There is one last hope for Rovio — The Angry Birds Movie. Dear god why?

ceejayoz 11y ago
That was my initial response to The LEGO Movie, which wound up being one of the best movies of the year. It'll all depend on the team behind it.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  When I saw that The LEGO Movie had not even been nominated for the Academy Award for best animated picture, I immediately stopped the recording of the awards show, and deleted it from my DVR. The decision to buy the DVD was absolutely effortless. With respect to the team behind the Angry Birds movie, they're using Sony Pictures. On the one hand, they have a couple Aardman releases and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. But on the other, they have The Smurfs.
  - km3k 11y ago
    The Smurfs was a bad movie, but did well with young children, which is exactly who a lot of the Angry Birds memorabilia targets.
minimaxir 11y ago
Kids, that's why.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

If game shops operate as movie studios, why don't they simply hire people temporarily. Movie studios cut their staff to marketing, sales, and licensing once their work is completed and released.

corysama 11y ago
Game shop operators have wanted to do that for a long time. The challenge has been that ramping up at a game studio has been a much longer process than ramping up on a movie project. The tools, skills and processes are a lot more consistent between movies than they are between games. It often takes working through a whole game to figure out how to be really effective at a particular studio. In practice, game shops that grow and shrink rapidly have found it to be more expensive than just holding on to the staff. This also has made outsourcing difficult and limited in games. The situation is changing slowly as the industry converges on a small number of standardized game engines. Knowing Unity or Unreal makes you easy to hire at a lot of places. But, if everyone knows Unity or Unreal, it also makes you easy to replace.
- lentil_soup 11y ago
  It's also very bad for employees when there are not many other companies around. It works for the movie industry because they have hubs (ie. Hollywood) where you have loads of studios so you can jump between productions without having to move. It's not the same in the games industry.
- justinhj 11y ago
  Even when using Unity and Unreal the ramp up time is still significant since we all use different source control, bug tracking and project management software. We also build large complicated systems on top of the game engine which come with their own terminology and best practises. Then there's the different back end and external APIs and libraries. I agree the situation is better now and getting better.
thrillgore 11y ago
Already happening. Firms like Compucom and Blindlight specifically handle the outsourcing/temporary hiring of QA and other staff. Some studios like Behavior Interactive exist as consultants/infill for game development. Experience with Unity/Unreal and even Blender are something a lot of creative and technical staffing agencies are hiring for.

josho 11y ago

The key lesson here is that entertainment companies are closer to gambling than outsiders realize. That is, to turn an entertainment company into a viable long term business you need to diversify and reduce risk of new title launches. That's why we see the large game companies producing sequels as opposed to launching new IP or game concepts. A mobile company that understands this model is tell tale games.

jdlyga 11y ago

Well, from a game perspective, Angry Birds 2 is pretty good. It gets rid of a lot of the annoyances in the first series of games. It's much easier to knock down small parts of buildings now.

jdlyga 11y ago

Well, from a game perspective, Angry Birds 2 is pretty good. It gets rid of a lot of the annoyances in the first series of games. It's much easier to knock down small parts of buildings now.

autobahn 11y ago

Brings up an interesting thought exercise. Let's say you do start a small mobile game company and your game blows up into a cultural phenomena like Angry Birds. And like all of these things, you know that one day in the indeterminate future, that phenomena will fade, much like Angry Birds has. How do you best handle this? Do you sell early and get out quickly? Do you try to build something larger out of the resources you now have? I'd be tempted to cash out early and just enjoy the fruits of my success.

cookiecaper 11y ago
The thing that indie devs don't recognize about gaming is that it's a hits business, just like film and music. _Success of your franchise is not an endorsement_. People consume hits and toss them away for the next big thing all the time. The reasons independent game companies make these mistakes is that they conflate the mass appeal of their creation with a personal endorsement and assume anything they do in the future will be well-received. That's rarely the case. To be a successful player in the hits business, you have to be putting out new, formulaic stuff constantly, aware that some percentage of it will never make back its money, some may break even, and some will make a lot of money. This is what movie studios, record companies, and the successful game conglomerates do. As much as it may get tiresome to see the bi-annual CoD release break records, it matches the expected behavior perfectly. But I digress. The direct answer to your question is pretty similar to what it always is: don't grow too fast, don't let it go to your head, and diversify. Personally, if I was in that situation, I think selling out to Activision or EA, who already have a functional hits apparatus, would be a path warranting serious consideration. A lot of game developers are eventually forced into that position anyway after they make the erroneous assumptions discussed in this comment and become financially distressed.
- the_af 11y ago
  What do you mean, indie devs don't recognize this? Maybe some (or many!) of them do, but aren't interested in "putting out new, formulaic stuff constantly". Some indie devs may be trying to get acquired by Activision or EA, the kind of indies who would grow to have 800 employees, and some may just be trying to do their thing in an environment that allows them to explore different gameplay and/or artistic choices. Not everyone's goal must be necessarily to sell thousands of copies at whatever personal cost.

larrik 11y ago

The article paints Angry Birds 2 as a paid app losing out to freemium apps, but when I downloaded it, it was a free app with way too many freemium parts. I deleted it shortly after, as I'm not interested in freemium mobile apps.

distances 11y ago
Not really, the article quite clearly says "... and its freemium model doesn’t seem to be working great." At the end the article mentions the game wasn't designed with the current freemium model in mind (since the first iteration was pay-to-install), maybe that threw you off?
- larrik 11y ago
  Very well could have

minimaxir 11y ago

The important chart missed is the Grossing rank for Angry Birds 2, which has been hovering at about #50 grossing since launch. It was not going to be a megasuccess like the first Angry Birds, or even a low-tier modern freemium title. (for reference, Fallout Shelter, a game that was highly experimental for Bethesda, is currently at #32 overall Grossing) It probably doesn't help that there have been more than 5 Angry Birds games already and people are sick of the gameplay. I'll give Rovio credit for trying to diversify from physics based games (Fight, Epic, Stella, Rovio Stars, etc.).

FilterSweep 11y ago
This is very important. I would also argue that Rovio never really achieved the "Freemium ideal" in the way that top grossing games: Clash of Clans, Game of War, and Candy Crush has. Now are other examples in the reverse, where the game is far too expensive to attract a large userbase. But Rovio hasn't been able to "toe the line" between an attractive "free-to-wait" game that is fun enough to draw in massive amounts of paying users - like other developers have - _despite_ having a brand marketable enough to make a movie off of.

bjacobel 11y ago

Was it ever relevant? Popular, sure. But relevant?

minimaxir 11y ago
Angry Birds was the franchise that a) first proved that you could make a media empire from a single app and b) you can sell apps for $0.99 and still get mega-rich. Incidentally, b) is no longer the case.
jonnathanson 11y ago
How are you distinguishing between the two? Relevancy is a relative quality. We don't say that something simply is or is not "relevant." It needs to be relevant in relation to something else. Usually some standard or topic. Recency and popular culture are common guideposts to which we peg relevancy. If we choose to peg relevancy to 'current pop culture,' then we could say Angry Birds is less relevant today than it used to be in its prime. And we'd probably say that Angry Birds was quite relevant in its prime, being the premiere game in the breakthrough period of mainstream mobile gaming. If we choose to peg relevancy to an industry standard -- say, 'current best practices in the gaming business' -- then we reach a similar conclusion. Angry Birds was hyperrelevant in its heyday, but less so today.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  Relevance is measured by influence, popularity by reach at one moment in time. Lots of boy bands are popular, but very few are relevant. I’m not saying that Angry Birds is or isn’t relevant, but there is a distinction between the two ideas that is fairly easy to observe in the wild.
  - dpark 11y ago
    > Lots of boy bands are popular, but very few are relevant. Relevant to what? Relevant to their fans? Obviously. Relevant to the economy? Probably, since popular boy bands would have a great deal of influence over a lot of spenders. Relevant to culture? Definitely. A popular anything impacts culture. Popularity pretty much implies some sort of relevance.

tcbawo 11y ago

Rovio seemed to be building a content distribution network within their apps (toons.tv). I was somewhat surprised they didn't move further into that direction. They had the brand and merchandising, just not enough personality to create a Loony Toons-like experience.

tfandango 11y ago

I'm not surprised, they have been cranking out the same game over and over again, re-branded and/or adding slightly different abilities without changing the basic game. After playing the Star Wars version for a little while I deleted it because the concept (while initially fun and interesting) had gotten old. They did release something called "Bad Piggies" too which I thought was a fun different game but along the same theme but that didn't seem to take off.

phn 11y ago
They also tried publishing different games, Amazing Alex for example. The truth is, for such simple things and for this definition of "success" (i.e. being the global hit of the moment) there is no formula. For a comparison, look at King, what success do they have outside of candy crush? And it's not for the lack of games as they have quite a few.
- chkuendig 11y ago
  As a counter-example, Supercell is extremely successful with Hay Day and Boom Beach besides Clash of Clans. Maybe it isn't all just luck.
  - phn 11y ago
    It isn't all luck, but they spend a HUGE amount of money to keep the ad ball rolling. And I may be being unfair not having played their games, but they follow the same mechanic, just being different themed, right? It is too early to be sure, but I'd bet they're still riding their particular wave.
    - ido 11y ago
      BoomBeach is the same genre as CoC but it's not a clone - it has quite a few changes in it (maybe an appropriate analogy would be C&C compared to Dune2, or Quake compared to Doom).
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

prawn 11y ago

Don't large game companies frequently shed staff after a large title has been released?

minimaxir 11y ago
They shed staff because they usually hire on extra staff (Art/QA) to meet deadlines. Mobile game development does not have that dynamic. The press release (http://rovio.fi/en/news/press-releases/696/rovio-sharpens-focus-on-core-businesses http://rovio.fi/en/news/press-releases/696/rovio-sharpens-fo...) explicitly says it's a cash flow issue.

zaphar 11y ago

Sounds like a case of too many eggs in one basket. Why didn't they diversify more into the micro transaction space with a different game I wonder?

SyneRyder 11y ago
I think they did try that - I loved the Rovio game Retry, which was a tiny plane flying through a Sonic-The-Hedgehog-like world, with a Flappy Bird mechanic and a retro 80s synthpop aesthetic: http://www.rovio.com/en/our-work/games/view/71/retry http://www.rovio.com/en/our-work/games/view/71/retry Levels were split into checkpoints (ala Sonic), and you could save your place at a checkpoint by either watching a video ad, spending a coin (collected in game or bought with real money), or you could fly on and get a bonus for completing a level without any saved checkpoints. I'm not much of a gamer, but I've apparently spent nearly 15 hours playing Retry (yikes).
minimaxir 11y ago
They certainly tried with Angry Birds Fight! (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-fight!/id933958078?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-fight!/id9339580...) and Angry Birds GO! (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-go!/id642821482?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-go!/id642821482?...) A few of the more recent physics games had strong freemium mechanics, like Angry Birds Transformers (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-transformers/id869231055?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-transformers/id8...) as well.
- deleted 11y ago
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- cwyers 11y ago
  My favorite Rovio spin-off of the Angry Birds franchise was Bad Piggies, sort of an Incredible Machines take on the physics game, where you had to build a contraption to complete the level objectives. So yeah, they certainly tried.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago

rocky1138 11y ago

This is such an assumptive title. Angry Birds is still very popular with children. This is like saying that Mario is no longer relevant because Super Mario Galaxy sold less than New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It makes me wonder if TechCrunch has a stake in seeing Rovio fail when I read clickbaity headlines like this.

abluecloud 11y ago
When you make 260 employees redundant, I'd say it's ok for people to make assumptions about your brand.
- sillygeese 11y ago
  It's even heftier percentage-wise.

0x0 11y ago

I tried Angry Birds 2 and was super impressed by the production quality and butter smooth graphics. Too bad the entire gameplay is a 100% miss: You have to wait or pay to retry levels after a while. This goes completely against everything that defines angry birds gameplay, which for me is to instantly re-start the level if I'm not satisfied with the first bird shoot. Absolutely ruins it. I'd much rather pay $X upfront for unlimited gameplay. Now it just feels like they're trying to cheat me out of real money every 15 minutes feeding some kind of virtual slot machine. :(

zajd 11y ago
The scoring system also makes absolutely no sense and removes any incentives to pay attention to the leaderboard
ma2rten 11y ago
Forcing the player to wait (or pay if they don't want to wait) has been proven to work well over and over again by numerous games.
- bpicolo 11y ago
  Proven as a good user experience: no. Proven to suck money out of people: yes.
  - ma2rten 11y ago
    I have a number of friends who play candy crush and before that I had number of friends who play farmville. If you ask them they will say they having fun playing those games.
    - bpicolo 11y ago
      And? Do you think it would be less fun for them if microtransactions were absent? Doubt it.
      - 11y ago

enlightenedfool 11y ago

800 employees for this game? Why?

chrisdbaldwin 11y ago
Hubris, mostly.

dharma1 11y ago

My 5yo son still plays some of the Angry Birds games on iPad (we have them all) and I was impressed with the production values of Angry Birds 2. 800 employees and offices in 9 countries sounds like a lot though, hopefully slimming down and releasing some new games will keep them going. Movie - remains to be seen, but I've watched countless AB cartoons with my son and I'm not sure there is enough depth/meat in the characters, they don't really have personalities or even names you remember. Rovio has ambitions to be the next Disney but you really need memorable/interesting characters for that.

josu 11y ago

We need Uber for software developers. The gaming industry is looking more and more like the movie industry. Long term contracts no longer make sense. The industry needs to adapt.

yuliyp 11y ago
Ummm what? Part of the whole point of making companies is because individuals can't risk going bankrupt to make a game, while a corporation that takes investments from people who understand that they may lose money on the deal shifts the risk to those more able to take that risk on. Uber works because the number of cab fares is large enough that over non-tiny durations the risk averages out and makes the situation tenable for the drivers. When you deal with programmers. Or were you thinking of something like freelancing sites like rentacoder? The internet means that those basically provide work to people with spare time or in developing countries, not first-world countries.
- josu 11y ago
  Maybe using the Uber analogy was a mistake. I used the analogy because I wasn't exactly thinking exactly about rentacoder kind of place, I was referring to something more curated, where work is somewhat commoditized. But I was also thinking of the relationships that actors and crew have with movies, or private contractors with projects. In my view, which admittedly is not that well informed, hiring and firing people à la Rovio or Zynga, based on market trends is a very inefficient way to manage your workfoce. If Rovio stumbles upon another hit, they will probably need all those workers back.
nols 11y ago
Like Upwork (formerly Elance and Odesk)? Hiring contractors instead of employees isn't that uncommon, and now we're even seeing the startup studio become more popular as a business model.

listic 11y ago

I never understood the appeal of the original game; it was just not interesting for me to fire birds to destroy ever more elaborate pigs' structures. I found Tiny Wings to be a much more pleasant game about birds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Wings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Wings Maybe I am just less angry than most people? It would be nice to not lose touch with the other people if I hope to make something with mass appeal some day.

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wnevets 11y ago

Quite frankly they shouldn't of been as popular as they were. They stole gameplay from existing flash games and threw an "angry bird" skin on it.

caligastia 11y ago

When the first game came out, it was written in Lua and they had embedded a runtime in the iOS application - interesting that Apple at first forbade that practice, to the point of scanning libraries for interpreters. It then became the #1 iOS game - goes to show, allowing companies to bring their own language to the platform allows for unexpected successes. Hopefully Apple learned from that lesson. All the same, 800 employees for a game seems excessive, but then we have 5000 employees at Facebook for a website..

serve_yay 11y ago
The only lesson Apple seems to have learned is that the App Store is great, and everything they're doing is working gangbusters.
noir_lord 11y ago
> Facebook for a website.. That might be the greatest understatement I've seen for a while. It's technically true but it really doesn't paint any kind of picture. Facebook is a website in the same way that the Library of Congress is a 'place that stores stuff'. I'm not a huge fan of Facebook as a company but I admire the engineering talent that goes into dealing with 1.5 billion active monthly users, the incredible problems of adding even tiny features at that kind of scale.

chkuendig 11y ago

https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rovio-entertainment-ltd/id298910979 https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rovio-entertainment-ltd/i... Maybe we reached peak Angry Birds...