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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

#111

Post by bigtunacan »

fasteddie wrote: post #89
icebraining wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear this argument so often that trials hurt sales because people decide not to buy after playing. This is the benefit of the trial to the end user; I can see if I like the game before I put money on the table. Even if the game is stellar, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

The inverse of this is likely just as true, sales are not made due to there being no free trial so someone just doesn't bother with it at all.

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

#112

Post by ido »

phn wrote: post #37
chkuendig wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter-example, Supercell is extremely successful with Hay Day and Boom Beach besides Clash of Clans. Maybe it isn't all just luck.

It isn't all luck, but they spend a HUGE amount of money to keep the ad ball rolling. And I may be being unfair not having played their games, but they follow the same mechanic, just being different themed, right? It is too early to be sure, but I'd bet they're still riding their particular wave.

BoomBeach is the same genre as CoC but it's not a clone - it has quite a few changes in it (maybe an appropriate analogy would be C&C compared to Dune2, or Quake compared to Doom).

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

#113

Post by calgoo »

logfromblammo wrote: post #76
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Star Wars is a universe and a huge story, and one which many people connect to. AB is just a dumb game for casuals. I don't think its remotely possible to turn AB into a Star Wars-like franchise. Its amazing to me they've lasted this long or got as big as they got. The casual spending of the lowest common denominator always kinda surprises me. Who is buying all this stupid swag? Where is it now? I guess its al…

Angry Birds did not have a heroic epic to hang everything on. Here's its story: pigs steal eggs, then birds get angry and fight back. In the very short period of time that I was paying attention to it, I am not even aware of an effort to name the various birds, much less develop a backstory or personality for them. Gaming, and particularly mobile gaming, is a hits-based industry. Angry Birds 2 is actually Angry Birds…

WoW is a good example of this. It was huge, but so many of us got tired of the expansions and having to do the normal gameplay to get a new character up to a good level. I think they finally redesigned the starting areas, but i think it was a little to late.

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

#114

Post by ido »

extesy wrote: post #97
listic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are a lot of non-engineering jobs there. You've seen plush angry birds in stores, backpacks with angry birds pictures, etc, haven't you? Someone has to design, market them, negotiate with suppliers/retailers, etc.

They've also made lots of other games (many of which canceled before release) - it's just that none were close to as successful as angry birds.

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

#115

Post by ido »

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…

Look at it this way - the guys making this decision probably end up with more money than they could possibly hope to spend either way (just stash away a couple dozen $MM).

Might as well take the risk of trying to build an empire?

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #98
fasteddie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a source for those numbers? I'm curious about what % of the top-grossing apps are considered "the best" i.e. if 1% of apps are making billions but the other 99% are complete flops, it seems ludicrous that anybody would try to enter the market as this stage.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by swozey »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #77
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…

Ugh. Greedy idiots are ruining mobile gaming. There are virtually no good games anymore as they all are designed to require in app purchases, they are not designed to be great games, just to con stupid people out of money. Gaming on mobile is dead because of this, yet continues to make money due to such scams.

The few fun games I've found, games like 80 Days, and a few others I can't think of right now I luckily stumbled across thankfully. It's a mixture of an absolutely terrible Appstore and all these IAP games on the top lists that makes them so hard to track down. I'd love it if Steam became an app store for mobile devices.

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

#118

Post by JoshTriplett »

ma2rten wrote: post #70
bpicolo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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

#119

Post by mangeletti »

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…

In my opinion, this whole paradigm shift is partly the result of a lack of trust in customer reviews. If customer reviews could be trusted to be authentic, people could look and see that the game is rated five stars and make their decision based on t trusted to be authentic, a lot of people would make their decision based on a game's rating. Instead, app developers have gamed the system by paying for reviews (e.g., the infamous 2008 case of one developer earning hundreds of thousands in a single month after paying Amazon Mechanical Turk users to download his app and rate it 5 stars, among many others), etc.

The result is an unwillingness from many consumers to risk more than a single dollar for a game. I, for one, used to pay up to $10 for good games (e.g., I've purchased all 3 N.O.V.A. editions for $7.99 or so), but these days I am reluctant to even spend a dollar on an app.

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