Years of overestimating its fortunes have left Rovio Entertainment scrounging for money.
It feels like it wasn’t that long ago when Angry Birds fired its way onto the mobile gaming scene. To be clear, Angry Birds wasn’t revolutionary. Its game style, in which users launched small birds from catapults in order to crush enemy structures, was not so different from a free-to-play browser game known as Crush the Castle. What set Angry Birds apart was its colorful cast of characters. Even the most casual of gamers could enjoy the sight of angry faced birds colliding into the faces of angry pigs. The simple nature of the game invited players in, and the escalating levels of difficulty made it challenging even for gamers with a few years of experience under their belts. Angry Birds capitalized on its success by pairing with other franchises. At the height of its popularity, the beloved mobile game found success with its Star Wars themed releases. It even found its way onto television in the form of cartoons, and there are ongoing talks of an Angry Birds movie.
With all that success, you might imagine that the owners of the franchise, Rovio Entertainment, would be sitting back in their reclining chairs, feet propped up on their boardroom desks while they smoke congratulatory cigars. That doesn’t seem to be the case. It was three years ago that Rovio CMO Peter Vestabacka claimed the company would grow larger than Disney, as it expanded from digital to physical platforms. In 2015, that dream seems to have died, and rather quickly. Only six months ago, the company was forced to lay off sixteen percent of its work force. At nearly the same time, CEO Mikael Hed, who actually helped co-found the company, was forced out of the company. With the head of the company gone and its workforce shrinking, Rovio’s grand ambitions seem to have been tempered. After five years of growth, it seems the company had overestimated how high it could fly. 2014 was the first year in which it saw a major profit decline, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop before the year’s end.
To be clear, the profit drop was not insignificant. Between 2013 and 2014, Rovio’s profits dropped an incredible 52 percent. No company, of any nature, could see such a massive decline and not take action. The combination of layoffs alongside Mikael’s firing were done in hopes of shaking up the company, but all hopes were pinned to a single game: Angry Birds 2. Which brings us to the game’s release. If Rovio Entertainment was hoping to increase profits and get back on firm footing, it chose a method that has become despised by many gamers. Complaints of microtransactions aren’t new, although they might have reached a fever pitch with the release of Dungeon Keeper for mobile platforms last year. In making Angry Birds 2, Rovio made a specific choice. It saw how much money could be generated through microtransactions, and decided that was the secret to restoring its wealth.
The problem for Angry Birds 2, as it was with Dungeon Keeper, is that its fanbase was used to a certain type of game. Rovio Entertainment chose to change the foundation of Angry Birds by using a limited life model. After five lives, a player has to wait 30 minutes before they can continue playing the game, or they can spend money to continue. Anyone that’s enjoyed Angry Birds knows this is almost a non-starter. Some of the levels become so complex that experimentation and failure become a necessity. The imposition of a limited lives model goes against one of the core aspects of the game. Enjoying the destruction is part of a player’s joy when they choose Angry Birds over another mobile game. Now, players have the tension of risking a 30 minute cooldown set against the joy of experimenting with exploding birds and collapsing structures. Previously, you could retry a level in multiple ways, hoping to achieve higher scores. Now, the player is discouraged from doing so. A cooldown period runs counter to what made Angry Birds so enjoyable in the first place.
So, it should be no surprise that there’s been a cold reception to the new Angry Birds 2. If Rovio Entertainment was hoping that its new game would set the franchise back on solid ground, using microtransactions as a supporting structure, then it badly missed the mark. Microtransactions could have been used in dozens of ways to supplement the game, rather than limiting it. The decision to limit a player’s lives will only lead to frustration. Players have even less reason to pick the game up if, after playing around for a bit, they’re put on a cooldown. Increasingly, players and critics are speaking out about badly implemented forms of microtransactions, and players have more choices in gaming than ever. When developers undercut the core function of their game with unnecessary charges to the player, a player can simply move on to another game. Even the European Union has stepped into to say that microtransaction games cannot be called free.
Where will Rovio Entertainment be in a few years? Perhaps their finances will stabilize because of their new financial model, but any dreams of becoming as big as Disney are surely dead. Angry Birds is now part of the same mobile heap that nickels and dimes its player base, and it’s hard to imagine how a company can reach for the stars when it’s too busy scouring the sidewalk for a few pennies to add to its pocket.
Original Author: jl_theprofessor