Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular • Hacker News Board

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#211

Post by somenameforme » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

mkaic wrote: post #52

NackerHughes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only speaks of how severely the attention span of the average person has plummeted in recent decades. It's impossible to sit through a movie without enough dopamine-inducing distractions or MTV-style jump cuts every few seconds.

Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.

There's a fun little fact most don't know. The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades. Here are the data (US only): https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

Peak movies in terms of both tickets sold and total real revenue was 2002. Everything since then has been a rapid decline, paired with lots of inflation and ticket prices going up even faster than inflation. I'd also add that those data don't consider another aspect. Since 2002 the US population has increased by more than 45 million. Seeing ticket sales plummet alongside this is especially telling!

So, while you may personally find what passes for a movie now a days as "more engaging", even "the masses" would beg to differ!

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#212

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #207

JohnFen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the pool has been poisoned already. If I see that an app uses microtransactions, I won't install that app -- so I'd never even know that the microtransaction was to purchase the game outright.

I get that. But you can preview what micro transactions are offered prior to purchasing, which is progress.

Is that an Apple thing? I don't remember seeing anything like that in the android Play Store. That would be useful.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#213

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #143

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Disney can quite be put in the same breath. (disclaimer: shareholder, though not in any grandiose quantities) I always imagine Disney as basically 3 apparatuses: 1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly trea…

> But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do. Counterpoint: they saturate the market with so many MCU, Star Wars and other high-profile (Avatar!) content that it is all but impossible for anyone else to get enough people into cinemas or onto streaming. Like, people only have so much money…

> entertainment is in for dark, dark times

Sadly, I share this pessimism. It's why I've started collecting DVDs of movies that I know I'll want to see again. Mostly used, because so many aren't even available on disc anymore.

I see the day coming when these movies will simply be unavailable to me, and so need I need to archive them myself.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#214

Post by sitzkrieg » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

fho wrote: post #208

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think there is a function of whales, not yet explored. Dont try to milk them with items. Make them gatekeepers. They get to decide who plays the game, who gets to enter, and who gets to stay. Sounds strange, but if they keep the thing afloat, they might aswell have a total say on that.

Wow ... That sounds like a massive power trip.

obnoxious pay to win items in garbage pvp games definitely cater to this

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#215

Post by cld8483 » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #204

AlexandrB wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is strongly contradicted by how frigging long movies have gotten. Old action movies are often in the 90-120 minute range. New action movies - that are supposedly lacking that old filler - are often 3 hour slogs.

Based upon this analysis movies haven't actually gotten longer: https://towardsdatascience.com/are-new-movies-longer-than-th... But here again we're looking at Marvel movies and saying that's the entirety of what's being offered in cinema's these days. It's not, but it feels like it.

In the mid 00s or so I would have said that movies were getting shorter. If anything, movies are getting longer again.

But there is no general relationship, direct or inverse, between the length of a movie and the quality of a movie. Some movies should be short and some movies should be long. It really depends on the movie in question.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#216

Post by falcolas » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #212

falcolas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that. But you can preview what micro transactions are offered prior to purchasing, which is progress.

Is that an Apple thing? I don't remember seeing anything like that in the android Play Store. That would be useful.

I thought it was both stores, but yes, I'm referring to the Apple app store.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#217

Post by cld8483 » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #209

cld8483 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a roug…

I agree that the SW trilogy was a mess, but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, nor does it excuse the amount of sexist comments against Daisy Ridley. For BP, it was the same. The whine from the far-right about "who wants to see s in movies", "we're being ethnically replaced", "this is our future" etc. was unacceptable.

> but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media,

I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures.

Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#218

Post by mdip » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

dgb23 wrote: post #148

joenot443 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me about it. I'm an iOS engineer at FAANG, but I've been shipping my own apps since 2011. It's depressing that there's no longer a market for paid, high quality, ad-free, fully packaged apps and games. I actually interned at a mobile games studio for a summer and it was made clear to me what the profit model was: pander solely to the whales, ignore the free users. Something like 70% of our revenue came from 2% o…

Is that the only conclusion? There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games. They will happily pay for substantial extensions and content upgrades. They will remember your name and see anything you release as worth considering. It's a smaller market of course but a sustainable one. In terms of video games. I'm personally not a mobile gamer though. Maybe it's quite a bit different fro…

   > There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games.

You're right on, here, and it points to a few problems and opportunities. I'm that subset of users yet I have an incredibly hard time finding apps meeting my criteria in the app stores. They are there. I often find them right after purchasing something that isn't as good or using one of a hundred free-but-varying-degrees-of-awful apps because I don't trust that spending even $3.00 isn't going to get me a paid-but-varying-degrees-of-awful app[0].

The amount of awful going on in the space of "mobile development" long passed unacceptable to me. The idea that McDonald's is $10.00 or $4.50 if I use their app that crashes, needs my location, sends me random empty notifications and every other minor and major brand's app that wants to slurp up any little bit of data they can and make my notification tray useless. I'm not happy with the "check this box and we'll track everything you do but 'trust us'" cloud-enabling Windows and every app being non-functional without an internet connection and the "functionality provided" often being "license validation" and/or "share this! social network features and data mining"... takes a breath yeah, that got away from me ... but it's just nuts.

[0] The reviews which mix in the mess of one-stars from "a bad release" among the five-star "some of which were clearly paid for" just leave one wanting to take up drinking.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#219

Post by mindslight » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #201

mindslight wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reforming copyright length is more straightforward than trying to come up with some roundabout way to incentivize it. Angry Birds was released in 2009, 14 years ago. By its publisher's own admission, it has run the bulk of its financial value. Angry Birds should now be in the public domain, including source code that should have been escrowed as the creative work (distributed binaries are mere mechanical derivatives)…

> Reforming copyright length is more straightforward than trying to come up with some roundabout way to incentivize it. It would seem like that naively, but we've seen that even stopping the copyright term from continually lengthening has been impossible. Making surface changes to copyright (that could easily be rolled back) will take as much or more effort than rebasing copyright on a clearer, more logical foundatio…

Presently, the political arguments are ultimately just pointing out the absurd inequity of the current regime, so that people stop believing in and following these laws that the content cartels bought and will continue to buy. The only way to overcome thoroughly entrenched corruption is through mass disobedience, like the "drug war". The summary of what I really think about the combination of copyright, DMCA anti-circumvention and summary takedown, restrictions created from computational complexity, and monopolistic app stores, etc is "do what you want 'cause a pirate is free".

The path to real progress is getting the masses to self actualize and use self-representing computing technology, rather than falling for the siren song of advertising dollars promising fallacious convenience. These monopolist-makes-arbitrary-problematic-decision stories are mostly irrelevant once you've escaped their proprietary locked down world. Sure, it's less good that I can't just type "angry birds" into Aurora Store and have the game magically appear, but if I cared that much about it I should have kept a copy when I first installed it. But even though I didn't I can probably find it in some android torrent anyway - similar to every other orphaned work.

Re: Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

#220

Post by cld8483 » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #211

mkaic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.

There's a fun little fact most don't know. The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades. Here are the data (US only): https://www.the-numbers.com/market/ Peak movies i…

> The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades.

Alternative read: the industry is dying so they double down on pandering in an ultimately futile attempt to bail out the sinking ship.

Consider anime: It has been a dying art ever since Japan's economic stagnation/recession in the early 90s. So the anime industry (generally, with some exceptions) turned hard into pandering to their most base fans, lonely dudes. Lots of waifu characters designed to sell body pillows and trash like that. This hasn't improved quality and sales continue to slump, but they're still trying.