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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

#81

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

codingdave wrote: post #72
Tiktaalik wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You would almost have to copy how YC incubates startups - fund small teams to build prototypes, expand and profit on the hits. The individual teams take on the risk, while you are diversified enough to make money on the big picture.

I'd suggest a Hollywood movie studio model. One parent company that can groom and produce multiple games in different genres. Each game gets its own company with money invested in development and profits over a limited lifetime in sales. No one expects Titanic to make the same amount of revenue in year 2 as the year it gets released. Expect a huge spike in revenue for popular games early on with a long tail of diminishing returns. If you can capitalize on the intellectual property like Disney does you can create a merchandising revenue stream that may last a long time.

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

#82

Post by icebraining »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #67
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…

What about trial versions? Are they supported by the app stores already? Seems like they'd solve the psychological problem.

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

#83

Post by chkuendig »

bpicolo wrote: post #78
ma2rten wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And? Do you think it would be less fun for them if microtransactions were absent? Doubt it.

I don't - apparently people prefer nagging screens in games subsidized by a minority of whales over games everybody has to pay to download.

After all, this is how the app stores started. Nobody would have switched to Freemium if Gamers preferred the Paid Games.

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

#84

Post by dpcan »

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…

Angry Birds 2 felt like the exact same game to me with new birds and scenery maybe. I couldn't figure out how they could pull this IAP nonsense - especially when so many other versions of their games are out there for free, most of which I haven't finished 10%.

If I feel the need to sling a bird, I'm sure there are plenty of levels I haven't tried yet that I can still play for free in other versions.

I couldn't wrap my brain around what their strategy might be for this new game.

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

#85

Post by wvenable »

tfandango wrote: post #6

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 sa…

It's the same thing Nintendo does with Mario.

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

#86

Post by logfromblammo »

ceejayoz wrote: post #17
imauld wrote: post #13

> There is one last hope for Rovio — The Angry Birds Movie. Dear god why?

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.

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.

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

#87

Post by yuliyp »

josu wrote: post #63

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.

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.

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

#88

Post by 0x0 »

icebraining wrote: post #82
hesdeadjim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about trial versions? Are they supported by the app stores already? Seems like they'd solve the psychological problem.

In the early days of the App Store, people solved this problem by publishing two apps, a free "lite" edition and a for-pay "full" edition. Not sure why this isn't used more. Maybe because it's a hassle to migrate data (game progress, saves, etc) between apps, but I thought at least in modern iOS versions, multiple apps can share a common bundle ID prefix.

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

#89

Post by fasteddie »

icebraining wrote: post #82
hesdeadjim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about trial versions? Are they supported by the app stores already? Seems like they'd solve the psychological problem.

Conversion on anything trial-like, is going to be very small, and likely worse than even an upfront purchase because you will hit some people who are satiated with a small amount of trial gameplay or people who decide not to buy after playing.

Keep in mind that the best premium apps have lifetime revenues in the low tens of millions, and the best F2P are in the billions.

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

#90

Post by 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..

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