The makers of Angry Birds, Zynga, and Candy Crush all have the same problem. They've essentially won the lottery. Sure, you need to have a well-designed and built game to start with (no denying them that), but after that, you then need the 1 in 10,000 chance that this just happened to be the thing that the consumers focused on to have it become the "it" game of it's time.
If there was a formula that guaranteed winning that lottery, then people would do so every time. But all they can do is buy a ticket by creating a decent game, and the cost of those tickets is greater than the expected return.
So, you have the builders faced with a truth too terrible to accept: They weren't the sole authors (or even the most significant element) of their success.
And in the end, they will lose almost every penny they made in their tremendous success rather than go with the logical path: keep the company small, put a few games out to capitalize on the name recognition while it's still profitable and understand that no matter what you do, your company is in a trajectory that inevitably leads it into the ground.
In other words, they won a lottery, not founded a long-term successful game company.
