When Angry Birds lost its charm..

Why you must be careful to protect your base when looking to maximize revenues in free to play gaming

When Rovio launched Angry Birds in late 2009, it was an extremely charming, simple addictive game. Like everyone I loved it, and played it for hours. My then 4 year old played it all the time as well. It appealed to everyone, and it cost just $0.99, which was an incredibly disruptive price that put the first nail in the Nintendo handheld gaming coffin. Recently though, Rovio has started to show signs of trouble, and the press has noticed that Angry Birds is nowhere as downloaded and played as it used to be.

The latest incarnation, Angry Birds Stella, was downloaded by my now 7 year old, and it struck me that where once he was engrossed in every Angry Birds release and wanted to finish it, with Stella he got bored almost immediately.

I looked in the charts and saw that Angry Birds Stella has dropped very fast in the rankings, see below:

I downloaded Stella myself, started to play it, and I immediately understood why. Angry birds has been free to play for a while now of course. Initially this was fine, but Stella is so overstuffed of power ups, coins, extra characters, shops, telepods, ads etc that it crushes the game. Angry Birds in 2010 was a delight in it’s simplicity, but also in it’s fixed cost. $0.99. Now Rovio tries to make a lot of money from a few players, while irritating the rest.

To illustrate my point lets look at a screen shot from the original Angry Birds, 2010:

Simple. Birds. Pigs. Score. That’s it.

Now lets look at a screen shot of Angry Birds 2014:

It’s hard to even see the birds….

The simplicity, and the beauty of the original game, has been crushed under a weight of free to play gaming features. Angry Birds moved into in-app purchasing with the ability to buy the Mighty Eagle, but as the pressure has come to squeeze out more from the core player base, it’s become overly complex. Candy Crush is also starting to suffer from the same problem. In the chase for more dollars, both Rovio and King are in danger of destroying their core base. It’s what happened to Zynga as well. And it’s a lesson for game studios everywhere. Your original idea was beautiful. That’s why millions played it. Somehow you have to protect the game that everyone fell in love with. Or your dreams of long term franchises will slowly fade away….