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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by codingdave »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #65
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…

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.

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

#73

Post by kaonashi »

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.

Sacrificing user experience for increased revenue does seem to work in the short-term at least.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by logfromblammo »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #45
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you mention Star Wars, because it's one of the few franchises that has been able to continually reinvent itself over the years, while raking it in from various video games, comic books, furniture etc. Angry Birds tried to do the same. A few years ago you couldn't walk past a park or school without seeing a kid in an Angry Birds shirt or carrying one of those goody stuffed pigs. Only problem is that t…

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 15. They lasted 6 years, which in the mobile gaming world is a success probably comparable with one show lasting 12 years on television. It was a very good run.

Unfortunately, to achieve real staying power, you have to develop your franchise story, usually across multiple platforms. When people become bored with it, your franchise dies. You have to keep it fresh and at least recognizable in the popular culture for decades, in order to become a permanent fixture. Otherwise, you simply have to make do with the occasional nostalgic revivals.

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

#77

Post by ChildOfChaos »

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.

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

#78

Post by bpicolo »

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.

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

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

#79

Post by justinhj »

corysama wrote: post #31
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.

Game shop operators have wanted to do that for a long time. The challenge has been that ramping up at a game studio has been a much longer process than ramping up on a movie project. The tools, skills and processes are a lot more consistent between movies than they are between games. It often takes working through a whole game to figure out how to be really effective at a particular studio. In practice, game shops th…

Even when using Unity and Unreal the ramp up time is still significant since we all use different source control, bug tracking and project management software. We also build large complicated systems on top of the game engine which come with their own terminology and best practises. Then there's the different back end and external APIs and libraries. I agree the situation is better now and getting better.
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