
Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades - davidbarker
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-12/04/rovio-110-redundancies
======
inDigiNeous
I've been hearing from friends who have worked close at Rovio that the real
talent has been fleeing from there for some time now already, and they have
been attracting people who are attracted to money, which is never a good sign
for sustaining business, as the creativity might be killed in the process.

Not sure if this true, would love to hear some more insight into this from
insiders or people who know more.

Might the same kind of hubris that Nokia had when they become #1 and they just
couldn't innovate anymore as the diversion between the paycheck of the leaders
and the normal workers became too big, and the thought process was "Were
number one, why try harder, our product is best!". The same thing can be seen
with Rovio, pushing the same shit down throats of people in new packages.

Seems this model of creating success is not just working in the long run,
maybe we should be thinking about building sustainable businesses and not just
rewarding those running the company in a huge way, creating feeling of envy,
hate and other stuff that can be also seen in the whole 99% vs 1% thing going
on.

~~~
tomp
> they have been attracting people who are attracted to money, which is never
> a good sign for sustaining business,

More accurately, it's not a good sign for a business to attract people not
driven by it's primary product. Rovio's product is games, so ideally they
would attract games-driven people, not money-driven people. On the other hand,
investment banks have been working quite successfully for decades by
attracting money-driven people, but then, their main business is money, so...

~~~
cynicalkane
> Rovio's product is games, so ideally they would attract games-driven people,
> not money-driven people

Ugh. This sounds like the excuse a boss at EA would give when forcing his
employees to work eighty hour weeks. In the real world Silicon Valley
companies have been very successful hiring good employees in part by offering
massive amounts of compensation. And then there is the other half of Silicon
Valley, which feeds off the overworked and undercompensated twentysomethigs
following their "passion".

~~~
oddevan
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You don't want "money-driven
people" in the sense that all they care about is doing the least amount of
work required to get paid. You want people that are "games-driven" in the
sense that they care about putting out a quality product and making a fun
game; because of that, they will work harder and __should be paid accordingly.
__

You are absolutely correct in that using the "passion" excuse to force 80-hour
weeks and/or underpay workers is BS. An employee being passionate makes them
__more __valuable, not less.

~~~
jiggy2011
How do you find the passionate employees and separate them from those driven
by money? If you advertise a high salary and a 40 hour week you will get
applications from both types of people and they will both say at the interview
that they are "passionate" because they know that will get them the job.

So perhaps the paradox is that you get better employees by offering a lower
salary?

~~~
pm90
Its a hard problem, to be sure. You will never know what their motivations are
unless you work with them. The best that once can do seems to be looking at
their work experience, at the kind of stuff and places they've worked on
before and then... taking a leap of faith in thinking that the person will do
well.

Passion is highly overrated, I think, and a lot of people define it
differently. For some, it means staying at the office for 12 hours everyday
including saturday. For others, it means keeping regular hours and
contributing good quality work everyday, yet recognizing that one might need
to work more (without overtime) when the job demands it. And the manager
should know not to make these kind of situations a regular thing and reward
the employees accordingly.

As to the question of attracting the right kind of people, although it can be
faked, the curios ones are usually the best. If the person you're looking at
is always asking questions, or making suggestions, not to impress you but to
get a genuine understanding of what you do and what you want her to do, that
is the best sign of a passionate employee.

~~~
jiggy2011
How do you tell if the person was motivated by passion or by money in their
previous jobs? You could look for people who previously worked for low pay and
offer them higher pay, but if they worked for low pay in the past then they
are probably willing to work for low pay again.

In the games industry is that if you work a 40 hour week then your game will
be delayed or have less content or more bugs than your competitors game who's
programmers worked for 60 hours and when your programmers burn out they are
easily replaced because so many people want to work in games.

------
pasiaj
Some people here are saying the company made big mistakes with their strategy,
growing the company too fast, etc.

They pulled in 400M+ of revenue out of a game where you launch birds at
piggies using a slingshot. I think they did some things right.

The lifetime of a company has been getting shorter and shorter for centuries.

Mobile applications, games especially, are the new extreme in that
development. These companies have a very limited lifetime.

It is only natural that companies in this industry expand rapidly, face the
limits of their growth, and then start shrinking.

The idea of lifetime employment is long gone. After Rovio dies, theres a
Supercell or a Mahjong spewing up somewhere else.

~~~
ebbv
> The lifetime of a company has been getting shorter and shorter for
> centuries.

Really? Because Apple was founded in 1976 and I'm guessing they aren't going
anywhere. Google was founded in 1998 and I don't think they're going anywhere.

Your assertion is really flimsy, and I think based on seeing a large number of
mismanaged companies that flare up and die quickly and then concluding this is
normal or even unavoidable. While it may be common, that doesn't mean it's
what has to happen.

Rovio took their success and drove it into the ground. They absolutely
saturated the market, coming out with new Angry Birds games and tie ins almost
constantly and flooding store shelves with very low quality (and in my area,
often dingy) plush animals, further lowering public perception of their brand.

I'd argue that if Rovio had been more judicious with their successful IP, that
public interest in it wouldn't have disappeared so completely.

You seem to be arguing that the fade was unavoidable since Angry Birds is just
a game where you launch birds at pigs with a sling shot. But that doesn't mean
the follow up games needed to be. Super Mario Bros was just a game where a guy
jumps on things. Now I'm not really saying that Angry Birds was necessarily an
IP with as much legs as Mario, but I think they burned it down.

Rovio chose the short term, maximum immediate profit path, and now we're
seeing the result of that. Zynga did the same thing. When you go all in
immediately, and don't think about what is best for your long term, you burn
out public interest in whatever you have to offer. When you don't take the
time to make what you're putting out compelling, people will start to conclude
everything you have to offer is just going to be more of the same. And they'll
be sick of it.

This is not the only path available, and asserting that it is just the way
things are now is ridiculous.

~~~
herge
> This is not the only path available, and asserting that it is just the way
> things are now is ridiculous.

Really? What other paths are available for game companies? Any examples?

~~~
jkaunisv1
Blizzard (WoW, SC, Diablo), Microsoft (Halo), Nintendo (Mario), Pocketwatch
Games (Monaco), the makers of Towerfall, DoubleFine. That's just off the top
of my head as somebody who isn't very current with the game scene. I've
included a mix of big companies, medium ones and smaller indie ones. There are
other paths.

~~~
herge
Blizzard has milked the WoW cow for all it's worth. And all three series
you've listed were created in the 1990's, so not exactly a beacon of
innovation.

~~~
Goronmon
I'm not sure how your point relates to the topic being discussed.

Blizzard has kept WoW going strong for a decade, releasing expansions (not
sequels) every two years. Diablo is on it's third iteration since debuting in
1996.

These are examples are a game developer taking a different path than releasing
as many titles as possible as fast as possible.

------
lentil_soup
"Rovio still plans to release an animated Angry Birds film in 2016"

I really fail to see what they are trying to do with this. That game has
hardly any "story" behind it and the characters are not really that
interesting. I know they're trying to push a brand but all this random stuff
they're making around it comes across as bland.

~~~
binarymax
I thought the same thing when I first heard of the Lego movie. I'm not nearly
as much of an angry birds fan as I am a lego fan, but from that experience I
learned to reserve judgement before I see it.

~~~
qq66
The difference is that the Lego movie was dreamed up by someone outside Lego
(Dan Lin) who then got the Lego company on board, not an exec at Lego deciding
that they "need to capture the film adjacency in 2014."

------
dabeeeenster
Is it just me or do these companies tend towards having a single massive hit,
growing too quickly on the hype and then getting into trouble? Rovio, King,
Zynga...

Wasn't Angry Birds Rovio's 54th game or something like that? Suggests that
it's almost impossible to predict/curate a huge hit game...

I was really tempted to short KING when they floated.

~~~
lingoberry
I don't know why they all make the same mistake of hiring literally a thousand
people after their one big hit. Only Mojang seems to have kept small enough to
sustain themselves in the long term.

~~~
jahnu
I guess it's not a mistake if you are a highly paid CEO with shares that grow
exponentially in value as your firm does. Exit quick or at least sell off some
of those shares before it goes to hell and then move on to your next job
having "been at the helm of a company with thousands of employees".

Maybe I'm too cynical.

------
niklas_a
And just three years ago people wrote things like this:
[http://scobleizer.com/?p=7382](http://scobleizer.com/?p=7382)

"It isn’t hard to see how they would become the coolest social network within
a month or two. Even cooler than Quora. Heheh. After all, a lot more people
identify with Angry Birds than identify with other services online (the same
exec told me they can’t keep Angry Birds merchandise in stock). "

------
yock
I remember paying for Angry Birds to remove the ads, then one day sitting down
to play only to find that the ads had returned. Hit game or not, too many
moves like that point to cultural problems not easily fixed with money alone.

~~~
spacehome
My first guess would be a bug.

------
72deluxe
I am surprised they employed that many people! What did they all do? They
can't all be working on pig noises, bird noises and basic physics simulations
can they????

~~~
Mahn
If you have the money, you can hire people that are extremely specialized in
specific areas, for example you may have a team of 5 people that is
specialized on constantly analyzing and optimizing landing pages, or another
one that studies only app usage in the first 3 hours after install, etc. These
are not generally teams you would want assemble for a startup, but people who
have years of expertise in very specific fields tend to be better at it than
generalists for obvious reasons. You _can_ do successful mobile apps wth 3
people, but if you can afford it and if politics/bureaucracy doesn't get much
in the way, it can be worthwhile to have a larger team of specialists.

~~~
lamuerteflaca
Sounds like a waste of money. If you are making lots of money then it may seem
like no big deal. Rovio, can no longer afford it of course. I'd rather hire 5
more developers to work on a new game.

------
DigitalSea
Rovio are one hit wonders. Not trying to be cynical or hate upon them, that's
just how it worked out. They got lucky with Angry Birds, but failing to
produce any new IP was their downfall. It's like a movie studio releasing the
same movie over and over again expecting it to break box office records and be
profitable. Sure people might go and see the first two sequels, but eventually
people will grow tired and stop caring. This is what happened with Angry
Birds. They had some great licencing deals, one of those being Star Wars and
made a heap of money off of merchandise.

This is the problem with most app companies these days. They build a
successful app, it is popular for a few months and then people stop caring.
Draw Something, Words With Friends, Flappy Bird, the list goes on. People have
short attention spans.

Would Nintendo still be around today if they kept on making sequels to Super
Mario? Probably not. Rovio tried to squeeze Angry Birds too hard and lost. All
they did was continually rebrand the same game with the same mechanics and
changed a few of the game assets.

~~~
brianwawok
Except Nintendo DOES keep making sequels to Mario, and they keep selling. The
difference is they release every few years, and fill in the gaps with other
stuff. Not a new angry birds clone with new graphics every 3 months.

~~~
DigitalSea
Maybe I worded too loosely. What I meant was, Nintendo are not simply making
the same sequel to a game like Mario, even though some of the original game
mechanic is there, they have always in my opinion made each Mario game better
than the last (like they have for Zelda and other games). They add in new
features and other innovative gameplay mechanics that make it feel like more
than just another Mario or Zelda game.

The issue with Rovio is exactly how you described it, a new Angry Birds game
with new graphics but the same mechanics, the same storyline and basically
nothing new.

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mcphage
I just hope that they release a sequel to Bad Piggies. It's a very different
style of game from Angry Birds, and is quite fantastic.

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sk2code
The gaming market is pretty dynamic and it is very hard to keep up with your
competitors. People do play games but I don't know many people who keep
playing the same game every day. Angry Birds came up with different versions
of the game but the game dynamics never changed. You were still shooting pigs
with birds, be in space or on mother earth. Some how these game companies have
lots of loyal followers. I visited NASA (Cape Canaveral) last month and there
they have a separate section in the NASA facility to attract kids with Angry
Birds (Space version). Pat on the back (pun intended) for people investing so
heavily in these gaming companies, when everyone knew that there is going to
be another game coming out soon which will rock for few years before dying.

------
butwhy
It always surprises me when layoffs are this large. I would have thought the
business would slowly scale down to keep up with business cessation. Guess it
would be more awkward to fire people one by one for redundancy purposes.

~~~
SeanDav
As someone who went through a process of constant threat of redundancy over
many years - it is far better for employee morale to just do a bulk redundancy
process, rather than dribs and drabs. Living with the prospect of every day
not knowing if this was the day you lose your job, when so many friends had
already lost theirs, is highly stressful and demoralizing.

~~~
vidarh
If you give people the idea that more firings are coming, you'll also see many
of your best performers leave first, because they have the easiest way out.

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qq66
The bottom line is that a single previous success is not indicative of likely
future success when creating new things. If you create something like
Facebook, that's fine, because you can monetize the core product indefinitely.
But when you create a game or a movie or a hit song that has a limited
lifespan, there's very little indication that you can do it again. Once you
churn out a long sequence of hits like Disney, you can claim to understand the
process, but until then you might have just done the right thing at the right
time.

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joeld42
Rovio was one of the few big mobile gaming companies that favored the cheap,
not free pricing model for games. When that model collapsed, they got hurt by
it.

Still, i'm very impressed that they were able to take a hit that could have
evaporated in a few months, and turn it into a pretty solid IP. Angry Birds
might not be as big as a Disney brand or something, but it's still doing good
and can support movies and merchandising. In the long run, those characters
and creative IP could far outlive the game itself.

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brunnsbe
One has to take into consideration that Rovio isn't today just a game company,
half or even more of their income comes from franchise products like e.g.
angry Birds soda and clothes. I have a friend who works as their soda manager
dealing with worldwide agreements with softdrink companies to produce Angry
Birds soft drinks, not exactly a job you would find in most game studios.

~~~
ctdonath
That's just milking a popular novelty for what it's worth while you can.

Duff Beer could have some staying power from its Simpsons connection, but
Angry Birds soda is just not compelling.

~~~
Cthulhu_
To you maybe, but what about fans that see it in the stores?

Don't underestimate the imagination and enthousiasm of the younger generation,
when it comes to Angry Birds, Minecraft, modern Lego, and franchises like
that.

Dismissing a successful business because you're not into it is just a bit
shallow-minded (or elitist).

------
knappador
_Rovio still plans to release an animated Angry Birds film in 2016._

We might be over-milking this one as a society at that point. I would put my
money on... something else, specifically just not more Angry Birds.

------
fonnesbeck
I would still play Angry Birds if it did not continually pester me for in-app
purchases. I'm probably not alone in dropping it for that reason.

------
ShannonSofield
My dog's Angry Bird squeaky toy I picked up in the bargain bin is the only one
she hasn't tried to tear apart.

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jussij
> hype fades

You mean like other over valued IPOs like Twitter and Facebook, that in time
will also fade away?

