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

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

#51

Post by zajd »

0x0 wrote: post #46

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 upfron…

The scoring system also makes absolutely no sense and removes any incentives to pay attention to the leaderboard

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

#53

Post by thrillgore »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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

#54

Post by sillygeese »

abluecloud wrote: post #40
rocky1138 wrote: post #32

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.

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

It's even heftier percentage-wise.

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

#55

Post by codingdave »

vladd wrote: post #44
codingdave wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

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

#56

Post by listic »

codingdave wrote: post #41
autobahn wrote: post #28

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…

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.

I am at a loss why does one even need hundreds of employees for a company that produces a simple arcade game. I mean, you are not supposed to scale an arcade game, are you?

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

#57

Post by ChuckMcM »

autobahn wrote: post #28

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…

Depends on what you want in life, personally I'm a big fan of develop enough capital to give yourself infinite 'runway' as an engineer (basically enough of an endowment to provide for your living expenses, your family obligations, and stuff to develop new things.) But that is me, I'd be happy spending my time building and programming gizmos while looking for commercial opportunities for the same. Ultimately its a fairly selfish target since in that model I'm not changing the world for the betterment of mankind and my social impact is limited to people I help along the way. And it has a safety aspect to it which is "make sure me and mine will be ok, then look to improving the rest of the world." but it is actionable and fairly straight forward to define as a target.

So then you have people like Elon Musk who have pretty much everything they could ever want, and they risk it all to start an electric car company. I have a huge amount of respect for his willingness to do that, I don't believe I would be able to. Of course in the 'excess success' category I would be putting that excess capital to work in things.

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

#58

Post by VLM »

vvanders wrote: post #48
autobahn wrote: post #28

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…

I think Notch is one of the few to handle this well. He supports other indie devs that look promising rather than trying to bottle the lightning a second time.

Something else rather important to consider is Mojang has (had?) 49 employees. Not 800 at peak like rovio, not 4900, not even 490.

One is an insanely complicated 3-d cad physics rendering simulator.

The other, the one with 20x the number of employees, is 2-d sprite based bowling with gravity.

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

#59

Post by Reedx »

autobahn wrote: post #28

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…

Stay small enough that you can use those resources to maintain an indefinite runway.

To me a windfall like that means you get to remove poisonous elements from the game development process. Namely marketing and business concerns, which tend to warp game design. For example, you would never introduce an artificial energy mechanic in a game that you made for yourself.

Now you can focus purely on making a great GAME. Everything that goes into it can be in service of making it a better experience. Which I believe also happens to be the best strategy to making a successful game.

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

#60

Post by ma2rten »

0x0 wrote: post #46

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 upfron…

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.
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