Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 131 posts

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

#61

Post by bpicolo »

ma2rten wrote: post #60
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.

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

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

#62

Post by 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.

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

#64

Post by the_af »

cookiecaper wrote: post #33
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…

The thing that indie devs don't recognize about gaming is that it's a hits business, just like film and music. _Success of your franchise is not an endorsement_. People consume hits and toss them away for the next big thing all the time. The reasons independent game companies make these mistakes is that they conflate the mass appeal of their creation with a personal endorsement and assume anything they do in the futu…

What do you mean, indie devs don't recognize this? Maybe some (or many!) of them do, but aren't interested in "putting out new, formulaic stuff constantly".

Some indie devs may be trying to get acquired by Activision or EA, the kind of indies who would grow to have 800 employees, and some may just be trying to do their thing in an environment that allows them to explore different gameplay and/or artistic choices. Not everyone's goal must be necessarily to sell thousands of copies at whatever personal cost.

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

#65

Post by Tiktaalik »

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…

Games is a hit driven industry and it is incredibly hard to predict what will become a hit. Incredibly great games can underperform for a variety of reasons. Even a bad release date could really hurt a title.

If one were to attempt to build a larger game company out of a single hit, one would have to create a company that would have a lot of variety of projects and that would be able to weather certain titles bombing. In practice it seems that this is incredibly difficult, as over the years the number of big game studios has steadily shrunk.

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

#66

Post by 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

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.

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

#67

Post by hesdeadjim »

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…

Unfortunately the market doesn't support selling a premium game at prices that allow anyone other than a small studio to keep the lights on.

We've been in the game since the beginning so I've seen the transition from selling a game at $4.99, then $2.99, then $0.99, and finally free with IAP. Despite being very successful we didn't enjoy that trend, but instead just adapted to it.

It's purely a response to the mobile consumer's spending habits and their complete unwillingness to psychologically accept the "risk" that the $5 or $2 game they bought might not be as fun as they hoped.

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

#68

Post by aamar »

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 it requires awareness about how deep the value of your product goes. E.g. I knew the creators of a very popular cable show (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) and despite surprising overnight mainstream success they were remarkably clear-eyed about how long the phenomenon was likely to last and how to exploit it over that time period. Other shows in related genres like Top Chef or Project Runway were capable of a longer life because their premises inherently support a richer variety of stories. Both kinds of properties can be valuable.

Angry Birds is predicated on a great, clever irony: fuzzy, harmless-looking creatures with facial expressions and behavior of furious vengeance. But it doesn't seem like there's a lot of deeper/substantive places to go with that: a single emotional register is quite limiting for storytelling.

The odd thing is that Rovio's actions are a mix of rapid exploitation (all the brand-sapping tie-ins, not embedding the birds in a bigger 'universe') and enterprise building (huge headcount, freemium model).

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

#69

Post by cookiecaper »

the_af wrote: post #64
cookiecaper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that indie devs don't recognize about gaming is that it's a hits business, just like film and music. _Success of your franchise is not an endorsement_. People consume hits and toss them away for the next big thing all the time. The reasons independent game companies make these mistakes is that they conflate the mass appeal of their creation with a personal endorsement and assume anything they do in the futu…

What do you mean, indie devs don't recognize this? Maybe some (or many!) of them do, but aren't interested in "putting out new, formulaic stuff constantly". Some indie devs may be trying to get acquired by Activision or EA, the kind of indies who would grow to have 800 employees, and some may just be trying to do their thing in an environment that allows them to explore different gameplay and/or artistic choices. Not…

>What do you mean, indie devs don't recognize this?

I mean hiring hundreds of people because one game became popular is a bad decision. It happens a lot, and the result is almost always layoffs and eventual bankruptcy, when a conglomerate like EA takes the opportunity to snatch them up.

If indie devs want to keep plugging away for personal fulfillment regardless of the popularity, that's great, but don't drag 300+ people into it unless you're going to be serious about making a successful business, which, in games, means churning out a lot of formulaic content.

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

#70

Post by ma2rten »

bpicolo wrote: post #61
ma2rten wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.
Post reply on HN