
Rovio to Cut 260 Jobs as the Angry Birds Franchise Becomes Irrelevant - vvvv
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/26/rovio-to-cut-260-jobs-as-the-angry-birds-franchise-becomes-irrelevant/
======
0x0
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. :(

~~~
ma2rten
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
Proven as a good user experience: no. Proven to suck money out of people: yes.

~~~
ma2rten
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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> 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.

I know several people who smoke. If you ask them, they will say that they
enjoy cigars and cigarettes.

~~~
cwyers
I mean, they probably do? Cigarettes and cigars contain nicotine, which is
very pleasurable to consume. Now, yes, it also contains a ton of carcinogens
and tar, but those don't actually make cigarettes not enjoyable, just not
healthy.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That was the joke/analogy, yes.

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tfandango
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.

~~~
nsxwolf
Even so, Angry Birds 2 has a level of polish that makes the original look like
some indie side project. If there's such thing as a AAA casual game, this is
it.

Which really shows how sad this business is -- a true sequel to a smash hit
that goes way beyond the original sells so poorly that it leads to mass
layoffs.

~~~
stefanmielke
It's probably because it was too late for a true sequel to arrive. When the
market was ready to receive another Angry Birds they threw 2 or 3 other games
that where exactly like the first one. If the second was Angry Birds 2, it
would be better received.

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autobahn
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.

~~~
codingdave
Absolutely cash out. Internet fame and popularity is fleeting. Building up 800
employees because of one hit is a huge gamble. You could get another hit...
but better odds are that you are just throwing money down the drain. Be happy
for what you have, monetize the crap out of it, sell it at the peak if
possible, and let it go.

~~~
vladd
It has been one of the criticism that gets brought up about the Blizzard CEO -
the fact that he won't invest unless the game is exploitable over long periods
of time:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kotick#Gaming_controver...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kotick#Gaming_controversy)

However when looking at Rovio and Angry Birds right now, it looks like a
really sound strategy.

~~~
codingdave
Gaming is a funny industry in that way - the moves that makes good business
sense sometimes piss off your customer base.

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minimaxir
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
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.

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larrik
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
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
Very well could have

------
imauld
> There is one last hope for Rovio — The Angry Birds Movie.

Dear god why?

~~~
ceejayoz
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
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
The Smurfs was a bad movie, but did well with young children, which is exactly
who a lot of the Angry Birds memorabilia targets.

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enlightenedfool
800 employees for this game? Why?

~~~
chrisdbaldwin
Hubris, mostly.

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dharma1
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.

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chkuendig
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rovio-entertainment-
ltd/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rovio-entertainment-
ltd/id298910979)

Maybe we reached peak Angry Birds...

------
listic
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.

------
caligastia
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..

~~~
noir_lord
> 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.

------
josho
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.

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

~~~
jonnathanson
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
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
> _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.

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rocky1138
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
When you make 260 employees redundant, I'd say it's ok for people to make
assumptions about your brand.

~~~
sillygeese
It's even heftier percentage-wise.

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tcbawo
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.

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

~~~
minimaxir
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-
fo...](http://rovio.fi/en/news/press-releases/696/rovio-sharpens-focus-on-
core-businesses)) explicitly says it's a cash flow issue.

------
rokhayakebe
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
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.

~~~
justinhj
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.

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jdlyga
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.

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wnevets
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.

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zaphar
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?

~~~
minimaxir
They certainly _tried_ with Angry Birds Fight!
([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-
fight!/id9339580...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-
fight!/id933958078?mt=8)) and Angry Birds GO!
([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-
go!/id642821482?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-
go!/id642821482?mt=8))

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/id8...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angry-birds-
transformers/id869231055?mt=8)) as well.

~~~
cwyers
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.

------
josu
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
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
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.

