Rovio Employee Negotiations Concluded
rovio.comI worked on Crush the Castle for Armor Games in the late 2000s. Angry Birds took the same game concept, added much cuter characters and art, and blew us out of the water with it. (No offense: we took it from someone else.) Now I feel kinda sad, kinda smug that their glory is fading a bit. Rovio seems to have forgotten the lesson that the greater your success, the more likely you are not to be able to repeat it. People tend to assume their best days are ahead, and thus expansion proves to be overexpansion when the best days turn out to be behind.
> Rovio seems to have forgotten the lesson that the greater your success, the more likely you are not to be able to repeat it.
Well said.
Another way to look at it is if your company can grow very quickly from almost nothing, it's vulnerable to shrinking almost as quickly too.
> Angry Birds took the same game concept, added much cuter characters and art, and blew us out of the water with it.
Those were certainly factors, but don't underestimate Angry Birds' better controls and better interface.
I eventually gave Angry Birds a try, well past the initial hype, played the free version for a while and then bought the paid version to get more levels.
I then gave Crush the Castle a try. Yes, the characters and art were not as cute (although personally I actually prefer leaving crushed bloody corpses behind instead of merely displaced living pigs...), but it took me just a few minutes to completely forget about that. When playing either game, I'm not spending my time admiring the art...I'm looking at how the structure reacts to my shot and figuring out what I have to do next to complete the destruction.
What stopped me from buying CtC was aiming. Angry Birds uses a slingshot, so I can pretty easily set the angle of my shot. CtC uses a trebuchet where the player selects the release point after the trebuchet is in motion. Getting a specific angle becomes a test of figuring out the right release point, and then getting the timing right to tap at just the right time.
Worse, with Angry Birds I can zoom out if I want so that I can see the slingshot and the target at the same time, which helps in figuring out the angle I need and the force I need. With CtC, you cannot see the trebuchet and the castle at the same time. Making that even more annoying, when the shot is in flight the camera uses a close up on the shot so you cannot see the in flight shot and the castle at the same time. You don't see them together until near the time of impact. This makes it harder to decide what correction you need to your timing.
The result is that Angry Birds for me is the more cerebral game. I want to concentrate on the physics problem of determining the weaknesses of the structure and where to apply force and how much to achieve that. The gameplay does not get in the way of the structural physics game. With CtC, there is this annoying reaction time game (timing the release tap) that gets in the way of the physics puzzle at the castle, and the annoying camera adds needless difficulty, and so although I enjoyed it enough to play all the way through the free version, I did not open my wallet to continue.
I remember the qbasic gorillas game. But there are older ancestors : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
I guess they were not able to innovate enough. It was a good franchise, but it hasn't had the longevity of things like Minecraft or Halo.
Details:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=angry%20birds%2C%20mi...
I wonder what they could have done differently? They sure licensed enough IP to create Star Wars, Rio, etc variants. They tried expanding into freemium racing games. I wonder if there was a way forward for them that they missed?
Q: How does this affect the Angry Birds movie expected in July 2016? https://www.pehub.com/2014/08/angry-birds-creator-rovio-ceo-...
Angry Birds had excellent design (Visually), something that has made both Rovio and King stand out.
I think Rovio just tried to monetize (and merchandize) too hard, in a way not fitting the mobile model. They should have tried to focus on growing horizontally and making the Rovio brand bigger than the Angry Birds brand.
They did try that by publishing apps under the Rovio Stars brand. None of the published apps became as big as Angry Birds though, so it was moot.
That's when you maybe reconsider hiring 800 employees behind the success of a single mobile game.
They could have had a better-timed liquidity event, like Minecraft did.
Probably they just grew too much. The Angry Birds franchise does well for itself, but there's a finite number of employees you can support off of a handful of good mobile games.
Still, thankful they made Amazing Alex. The Incredible Machine needed a re-make, and theirs is great.
This post was an opportunity to discover that Rovio had much more employee than what I expected.
Angry bird looks so much like one of those flash games you can create with a single coder and a single designer I never imagined they had more than 800 people now. I would have guessed a small dozen max...
I worked on a clone of Angry Birds a few years ago and you're right with one of your figures: about a dozen people were required to pull it off in about 9 months. Definitely not doable by a single coder and artist/designer though. There's a perhaps underappreciated but quite insane level of polish that went into Angry Birds, especially with the level design.
I like how they never even gave money to the guy that built the physics engine powering their whole schtick. He only asked for a shirt--when they finally sent him one, it wasn't the one he'd asked for. Stay classy Rovio!
I didn't know you were supposed to pay for using free software. Regarding the color he didn't ask for anything, they just sent him a red one after which he said that he didn't like the color.
When you've made as much money as they did off of something that is largely a tech demo for somebody's free software project, I think it's only right to show your appreciation for that person--at least offering a well-paying job or fellowship or something. Otherwise, you're just being mooches.
Definitely but I'm pretty sure the maker of Box2D has no problem finding jobs. Would you really give money if you were Rovio? How much? Genuine question. Would you do the same for every author of free software you were using? I'm guessing that would be thousands of people.
Possibly, but the amount of polish needed to turn a simple flash game into a billion dollar flash game requires more than a single programmer.
I don't know if I agree. The Angry Birds games are very polished with a lot of details.
Rovio does much more than just games. Videos and content delivery platforms, both promotional deals (NASA, movies etc.) and merchandizing deals need business dev people to make them happen. 800 is still a lot, but the difference in operations is obvious compared to your standard game studio.
I was wondering why they would need employee negotiations until I realized this was in Finland. In the US, you would come in one day to work and you badge would no longer work!
the press release doesn't give much context to what this is about - why are they reducing headcount? what's the story here?
2.10.2014 Rovio started employee co-operation negotiations because the growth hasn't been what was expected. The negotiations resulted to reduce the workforce by 110 people.
This procedure is required by Finlands law and this might seem abit strange to people from other countries where firing someone is not a case of 2 months.
Inability to find / produce / buy another Angry Birds.
My kid and I would still be playing Angry Birds and he would still be asking for the merch this Christmas if I hadn't become extremely disgusted with the constant push to make in-app purchases and buy other apps. It's before, during and after every board, every retry. I stopped playing, encouraged him to play other things and I eventually removed it from all our devices, it hasn't been missed since. They should have stuck with a free app (no ads, no in-app purchases) and made money from merchandise. They had a good thing going with the Star Wars TelePods except after spending an embarrassing amount on the figures to scan in we still had to deal with ads to buy weapons and tools.
I never appreciated how awful the modern gaming environment was until I had a kid. For little kids in particular, it's incredibly difficult for them to deal with accidentally clicking the "buy X now" buttons and back out of the purchase process.
Personally, I shifted my son and nephews/nieces to old video game consoles. They love the NES, N64 and ColecoVision that we found in my parent's attic, and there's no nickel and diming within the games!
My nieces each have Amazon tablets they play games on. I watch them play and they're become experts at clearing out the in-app purchase come-ons. They don't seem to have much of an issue with it, but it annoys me seeing them have to do it. I guess it's the price you pay for the sheer volume of choices you have. When I grew up with the NES, I couldn't get hundreds of games to try out for free.
I can't get behind it, I prefer to pay 5-75$ upfront for a full game (depending on platform) and no in-game purchases.
If I can't play the whole game without in-game purchases, then it's not a game, it's an interactive ad. If on top of that I have to pay for the privilege of playing the ad, it's downright criminal.
(I'm excluding expansion-type DLC, I don't mind paying for more optional content.)
it's unfortunate that the market has spoken - a studio earns more money doing IAP than traditional selling. I don't like IAP model either, but because it simply out-earns the old model, it's either do it or die for most studios.
I really wish more people would paid for a game the traditional way.
Exactly the same experience here. My kids loved the game but constantly ended up in the app store. I removed all versions and explained to them why and that was that ... forgotten.
Fortunately the Humble Bundle and paid apps still exist. I don't disagree with your statement, though.
Inauthenticity is truly an underestimated flaw.
Bad Piggies is fun and has better replay value as you unlock more abilities to get to previously unreachable areas.
In their words: "lower than expected growth". As Angry Birds were getting more and more popular, hundreds of people were hired to work on expanding the brand, but revenue levels did not increase in the same manner.