
7M Downloads: Why Angry Birds Is Free on Android - vamsee
http://phandroid.com/2010/11/26/rovio-over-7-million-people-helping-those-angry-birds-out-on-android-christmas-update-coming/
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cletus
Personally I view this as bad news for the Android ecosystem.

The iOS/iTunes ecosystem is incredibly accessible. You don't need a credit
card (important for minors; a _huge_ market). You can buy credit everywhere.
iOS users seem willing to part with cash.

Google Checkout on the other hand is not available everywhere Android is.
People seem less willing to use it (eg 50k paid from this post). You can't buy
credit in the retail chain. Google gives developers 95%.

The last one is actually a _huge_ problem. Google's 5% will never pay for
retail distribution (Apple's 30% clearly does).

Developers have come to the obvious conclusion: they'd rather have 70% of
(potentially) a lot rather than 95% of much less.

iOS has the option of paid and ad-supported. Android only having ad-supported
(realistically) is a major disadvantage.

The only way Abgry Birds could make it to Android is on the back of the
success of iOS. I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.

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alex_c
A minor point: outside the US, Android prices are listed as (some examples
from featured apps):

~CA$1.96

~CA$5.08

~CA$3.05

~CA$1.01

It's completely irrational, but I actually find myself less willing to buy for
"untidy" prices. I didn't fully understand why Apple has its tiered pricing
system, but now I do.

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darshan
That's relatively new, but I was glad when they changed it. To be clear, it's
not "outside the US", that's Canada -- the point is that prices are now listed
in local currency, including in the US.

Back to the point: while I'm pretty comfortable with translating Canadian
dollars, British Pounds, or Euros to US dollars, that's about as much as I can
do in my head. I'm much happier seeing ~US$1.17 than ¥99, and I'm much more
likely to buy the app.

So while I can see your point, I think it was definitely a change for the
better, and it probably resulted in increased sales.

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wzdd
I think the point was that iOS apps have a set of fixed prices in each area
(in local currency). Here in the UK the cheapest non-free app is 59p
(corresponding with a 99c app in the US store), the next is £1.19 ($1.99), and
so on. This makes for a better user experience because people can think in
terms of the price brackets.

Here is a summary of the price brackets: <http://www.mcmnet.co.uk/news/the-
app-store-explained-news>

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dpcan
I'd love to know how many active installs there are of those 7M downloads. I
must have downloaded it 3 times to my devices and it didn't successfully run
on any of them.

We have an app with over 1.2M downloads and around 500k active installs. I
think the active install rate is low because it is a LITE version. Only - I
haven't put ads on the game yet, and have been wondering whether it's worth it
or not. If it only makes a little per day, then I'd rather just leave my free
users alone and stick with the paid upgrade.

I'd also like to know what kind of revenue they are making from ads on
Android. I feel like if we made our game completely free, we'd reach over 2-3M
downloads pretty quickly and triple our active install rate, and if that meant
we were making as much in ads as paid downloads, then I think we'd consider
going that direction. It's just too big of a maybe, and we can't seem to get
any inside info about ad revenues to make the leap - even when emailing
Mobclix and Admob, we get no response to this question.

Worst of all - I wonder if we are leaving money on the table by not being an
ad supported app.

Ho hum.

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J3L2404
If you change from completely free to free w/ads you will incur quite a bit of
wrath in the reviews, at least with current users.

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dpcan
The free version is VERY limited however. So, going from 10% of a game to 100%
would hopefully sway the reviews my way even with ads, but still - hard to
say.

I could start slow, with just ads on the home screen, then maybe put them
throughout.

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SoftwareMaven
This seems to say really bad things for the Android marketplace. If a game as
good and popular as Angry Birds can't survive if charged for, it doesn't seem
like a good place for developers. Ad supported doesn't work unless you can get
to millions of downloads.

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davidedicillo
Something the article doesn't keep in consideration is the fact that Angry
Birds is so famous that most likely those people on Android who downloaded it
have seen their iPhone friends playing it and praising it for months...

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gregpilling
I have the game on my android phone and like it, so I put it on my wife's new
ipod touch. I am amazed at how much better the graphics and gameplay seem to
be on her ipod. The graphics seem much more detailed, and the controls seem
more responsive.

~~~
CountSessine
Byte code vs native code? I have a hard time believing that anyone would make
an Android game without the NDK (without which you're basically CPU starved -
Android isn't the platform for heavy CPU work), but maybe Angry Birds is
Dalvik-only?

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mdaniel
I have it on good authority[1] that Angry Birds is a native-inclusive app.
Also, I wouldn't look down my nose at Dalvik-only apps. The JIT (which, AFAIK,
is the target of the litigation) gets pretty close to optimal code the longer
it runs - and theoretically games run the same code a lot more than your
average application.

In fact, my EUR0.02 is that native-inclusive apps (just like any Java apps
which rely on native libraries) are worse, in my opinion, because it limits
the number of platforms that one can execute the apps upon. And as a huge
Linux fan, current Mac user, and user of x64 Windows at work, I can assure you
that I get left out in the cold a LOT.

It's one level of bad to tie your app only to Windows, which coincidentally
includes 90% (last metric I heard) of the world. It's another thing entirely
to say, "oh, sorry, your Android isn't the same as my Android: too bad for
you."

1 = unzip -l AngryBirds_1.3.5.apk|grep -i \\\\.so

~~~
CountSessine
_Also, I wouldn't look down my nose at Dalvik-only apps. The JIT (which,
AFAIK, is the target of the litigation) gets pretty close to optimal code the
longer it runs - and theoretically games run the same code a lot more than
your average application_

That's interesting - are you sure about that? There's a big difference between
a static translation JIT and the more modern and memory-intensive
progressively-optimizing JIT's that are used outside mobile. My understanding
was that Dalvik's JIT was a one-time-only translater. Its difficult to find
any comprehensive benchmarks of the 2.2 JIT - there are plenty of benchmarks
showing the 2.1 interpreter eating CPU cycles compared to native code (think
20-to-1), and Google themselves claimed that the 2.2 JIT would mean a 2-5x
improvement in CPU efficiency, but I'm still waiting for a set of
comprehensive cross-platform benchmarks.

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eli
I don't get why there isn't a version I can pay for to get rid of the ads.
They're annoying.

~~~
bryne
Because it'd be pirated ad infinitum and the game presumably makes more money
on the Marketplace with the ads included, no?

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DannoHung
This is neither here nor there, but I'm wondering if anyone else has an
opinion on this: Does anyone find the physics in Angry Birds INCREDIBLY
frustrating? There seems to be very little rhyme or reason to the way momentum
is transferred. And the material modeling just makes me want to bite my tongue
off.

~~~
irons
I've heard this complaint before, and it puzzles me. Figuring out the odd
physical rules (to manipulate them) is almost the entirety of the game. If you
don't enjoy the physics, then you don't enjoy the game, but blaming the
physics for your non-enjoyment is like criticizing Pac-Man because you die
when you run into a ghost.

~~~
DannoHung
I don't believe that this is intrinsically correct. Part of what makes I feel
makes a game good or not is if the rules are consistent and can be
extrapolated.

If every action is a special case, the game is frustrating to any player
trying to build a mental model of the cause and effect relationships within
the world.

Now on the other hand, the premise of a game and it's basic interactions may
be enjoyable, or at least conceptually enjoyable, by themselves. There need
not be the call for the player to accept the gestalt as it is.

Personally, I'd like to see an Angry Birds clone that made it a little easier
to understand what's going to happen when you launch a game object in a
particular way.

~~~
irons
Inconsistency can certainly break a game, but where's the inconsistency in
Angry Birds?

I've got three stars on every level through the first ten worlds, and only a
couple of levels seemed to require lucky breaks for maximum points. 3-1 was
the one time I gave up and found the three-star solution on youtube.

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shib71
Rovo could easily release a paid version without ads. It's practically ancient
tradition on the iPhone, which everyone is arguing is completely different to
the Android market. I just assumed that Rovo must be making more money from
ads than they ever could from sales. In what order did Rovo release versions
for alternate platforms? I would be interested in knowing whether there was a
point where they started preferring ad-support.

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pilif
From an UI perspective I really hate the ads in angry birds on android: the
advertised products are never interesting and the ad is placed in a way that
it can be accidentally tapped during gameplay (happened to me multiple times).

I would GLADLY pay to get the ads to go away. Maybe they should add a premium,
ad-free, version

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epo
And as lots of people have already pointed out, an ad-free version would be
pirated instantly. This way they make some money out of the Android user base.

Personally I suspect that once the hive mind gets to work even ads will stop
working and Android will simply not have any commercial-grade software
whatsoever.

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mikek
"Because it makes more money that way" is the short answer. While this
explains why they have a free version, it doesn't explain why they don't have
a paid version as well. There are plenty of people who would pay $.99 to
remove ads. Piracy is the only explanation for this that comes to mind.

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pasiaj
I think Rovio is putting all their weight into turning Angry Birds into a
global brand.

The mobile app market is still pretty limited. Getting beyond $10 million
revenue over all is incredible but nobody has any experience on sustaining
success in the mobile market in the long run.

Investing in the brand, on the other had, gives Rovio a lot more options -
licensing deals, a movie deal or whatever. It is a tried and tested model.

If Rovio got 7 million extra fans and alot of free media coverage by releasing
it for free on Android, that in itself might be a better deal than a half a
million in revenue from sales, even if you don't count the advertising
revenue.

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Indyan
Developer of Angry Birds: “Really Big and New Project Underway”
[http://techie-buzz.com/mobile-news/angry-birds-new-
project.h...](http://techie-buzz.com/mobile-news/angry-birds-new-project.html)

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dhughes
Still stuck on 7/11 :(

