Rovio delists pay-to-own <em>Angry Birds</em> because it hurt free-to-play earnings
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Strange how I don't know or see ANYBODY who likes or plays microtransaction based games, preferring to pay up front (just like myself) yet so many do play and make these guys so much money. Let me pay up front and play like a normal game.
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I started playing a Simon's Cat puzzle game on Apple Arcade (I don't remember the full title now) that was great fun for a while. Then I hit the wall everybody complaining in the reviews also ran into. The tile- and row-clearing consumables that were available for in-game coins went from skippable to almost mandatory to overcome the RNG. It was obvious that the difficulty spike was originally designed to drive MTX coin purchases, and they removed the store to go Arcade-exclusive but left in the manipulative game mechanics.
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I know dozens and dozens of people who spend hours every day loving microtransaction games.
They're all under 15.
A significant percentage of my kids' friends asked for "Robux cards" for their birthday. Their parents love them because they don't have to buy a game, and they're not the ones dealing with the downsides directly. The developers love them because - let's be honest here - it's pretty easy to prey on children.
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I think the difference in Rovio's revenues from classic AB and AB2 reaches the opposite conclusion: that the masses are more than happy to keep clicking buy in the app to feed their habits.
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Possibility A: Yes, they really think that, and have evidence to support it.
Possibility B: Their costs for the <5% are >5% of their expenses (marketing, maintenance, whatever), and it just costs them more to support such a small percentage of customers.
I suspect it's actually both.
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I still play PvZ 2, my in game store is broken, can't buy anything for years now. Something to do with my account, so the game really is free to play!
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I kind of wish this story had come out earlier in the week before the game was delisted. I discovered that Angry Birds Star Wars is also long gone apparently. I was able to find the paid Angry Birds Seasons on Amazon's Android appstore if anyone wants a microtransaction-free version. If you are interested, you better get it before Rovio notices that it is still there.
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The first one is Minecraft isnt it? And honestly I think Minecraft on Mobile is pretty decent. I just wish I didnt have to pay $4 ea month for to cross play with my PC.
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You don't need Game Pass to do this. Xbox Remote Play supports 360 games, so you could play the 360 entries of the Angry Birds series on your iPhone in the Xbox app, and then Airplay to an Apple TV. Latency can be an issue with Airplay but that shouldn't present a problem for the style of gameplay in Angry Birds.
Macs have Safari which Game Pass supports natively.
Angry Birds 360 is apparently an Xbox 360 console exclusive too, lol.
https://angrybirdsfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Angry_Birds_360
If your point is you can't play Angry Birds Reloaded on Game Pass, well I guess you can't play God of War on your Mac, either, so that's not much of a flex. Platform exclusives are exclusives to their respective platform, I guess.
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Well, I'm glad I purchased the original version way back when. I didn't get that "unity rebuilt" version because I didn't know it even existed, but looks like I missed out. Oh well... not like I want to give them another cent after this.
Oh, and those "free to play" pokemon puzzle games are incredibly annoying. Anything that "gates" my ability to play basic puzzles behind timers I can "chip away" at by buying crystals and nonsense like that isn't worth my time or my money. And yes, I recognize that this kind of attempt gating is literally how arcade games made their money.
Oh, and those "free to play" pokemon puzzle games are incredibly annoying. Anything that "gates" my ability to play basic puzzles behind timers I can "chip away" at by buying crystals and nonsense like that isn't worth my time or my money. And yes, I recognize that this kind of attempt gating is literally how arcade games made their money.
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Anyone remembers that comment from one of the Angry birds devs, about that it was the future of videogames ? Lol what a presumptuous douche. It also aged like milk that comment.
Still it was and is a very good game, and i also spent a euro to play it. In fact i bought it for iOS and Android back in the day. I
Still it was and is a very good game, and i also spent a euro to play it. In fact i bought it for iOS and Android back in the day. I
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As a developer (not games but it doesn't matter for this), I can clarify that maintaining a paid version in parallel does indeed have some costs associated:
All in all, if this game makes just 30K each month, it probably isn't even close to breaking even with all these costs.
So it's not just a question of pay-to-win vs pay upfront, but a rather calculated business decision on their part.
- A team probably works on developing it (at least removing all MTX stuff from the pay-to-win game, if this is just a fork).
- Someone (probably a team) needs to run releases for this game.
- Obviously, a QA team is needed to test each release and new features.
- It adds other extra costs (CapEx, OpEx, HR, Office Mgmt, etc).
All in all, if this game makes just 30K each month, it probably isn't even close to breaking even with all these costs.
So it's not just a question of pay-to-win vs pay upfront, but a rather calculated business decision on their part.
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Because of the breakdown of revenue for f2p games. It's all funded by the single digit percentage of 'whales' who pay an abnormal amount.
Those people also have an option, keep paying abnormal amounts or take a break from it and spend a couple of months playing with the one off cost of 99c. Likely Rovio can see the player data on who has done that as well, it wouldn't take a large number of people to start swaying the numbers. If you lose the 1% of 900,000 who do spend double figures in microtransactions, it's pretty easy to get over $30k.
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The whales, contrary to popular belief, aren't rich with too much money on their hands. They're people vulnerable to addictive behavior. They're preying on addicts.
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It's not just whales that make the business model lucrative, and the business model can be lucrative without any whales either. Rovio just needs at least 14% of its player base that's currently playing the paid version of the game to switch to one of the free games and spend at least $5 a month to break even on revenue. That means that at least 86% of the player base can play for free and Rovio will still break even or come out ahead, and the numbers become even rosier if more than 14% of the players end up spending money or some of the players end up spending more than $5 a month.
I imagine whales are more like cash bonuses for free-to-play game developers, as unicorns and oil princes are too statistically insignificant a percentage of the population to rely on for 80% or more of your company's revenue stream. Not to mention that even the most egregious pay-to-win games will have a hard time of keeping the player engaged while simultaneously time-gating a player that's willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on a game in a month. I also imagine if you're in the kind of situation where you effectively have infinite money and a finite amount of time, you'll end up moving on out of boredom or distraction rather than inability to pay and that revenue stream will dry up as a result.
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Part of the problem is that there has never been anything close to the quality of StarCraft released for mobile. If you exclude ports, I bet there are a few dozen games on mobile worth more than $20. Even Nintendo couldn't make it work. Mario Run is probably their best attempt and it's still a bad Mario game.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Angry Birds was released 14 years ago, quickly became a hit, saw two feature films that grossed $500M on a $140M budget and several cartoons, and sold who knows-how-much in merchandise. $30K per month isn't a lot, but it's more than enough for a game that's long been profitable and hasn't seen any development since its release. The Classics version is just a modern port of the original game, the majority of code is the same.
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Not to mention games that don't see code updates are getting delisted at a rather frightening pace, as though to erase all these company's old history so that time forgets what old games used to be like entirely. Unreal, a single player game, was delisted for no particularly good reason.
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Not sure if Nintendo couldn’t or didn’t want to make it work. They’ve always considered smartphone games a threat to their integrated business model, so when they finally caved and did a phone game, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t give it their best effort.
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I never played it myself, but I seem to recall some Pokemon mobile game doing pretty okay a few years ago...
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So the article says "negatively impacted" over and over and over, but never states how they know this and never answers the question of why the presence of one game would stop people from dowloading another game. Are we supposed to be psychic? If I can't find Angry Birds after searching for 10 minutes do they really think I'm going to buy something else just for the heck of it?
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I'm pretty sure Rovio is treating how having the paid version available "negatively impacted" download of the F2P versions in much the same way that record companies treated pirated music: doubtless those millions of people who downloaded that song would have otherwise paid $12.99 to purchase the CD if they weren't able to pirate it!
At first blush it seems reveresed, but I assume that Rovio assumes they could have gotten more money in IAPs from those users than they got up front from the purchase.
Maybe they're right? Lord knows I fell for a few of these kinds of games despite "knowing better". I'd like to believe they'd lose more goodwill with this kind of stunt than they'll gain from pulling it, but I'm pretty sure if I asked all my friends, family and coworkers what they thought about the news their first reaction would be "Angry Birds is still around?"
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I'm not even mad at Rovio. As a business it makes legitimate sense to do this. $30k vs $9m. A no-brainer. If anything I'm happy they took this long to do it, which must mean they really don't want to, but they need to raise revenue.
No, I'm more angry at the market that allows the micro transaction mobile game app sinkholes to exist in the first place. The app stores could do something about it, but they won't, because they also get a cut of that money train.
Amazon tried to make a marketplace where everything was free and there were no ads, but without a major way to get on iPhones and having to sideload it onto Android it greatly reduced their range of impact (and that Amazon store UI was also a bit dodgy).
Long sigh.
No, I'm more angry at the market that allows the micro transaction mobile game app sinkholes to exist in the first place. The app stores could do something about it, but they won't, because they also get a cut of that money train.
Amazon tried to make a marketplace where everything was free and there were no ads, but without a major way to get on iPhones and having to sideload it onto Android it greatly reduced their range of impact (and that Amazon store UI was also a bit dodgy).
Long sigh.
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idk if you or anyone else is looking for some mobile game suggestions but heres a few i enjoy on the go. 80 Days, Achikaps, Antiyoy, Minecraft, Mini Metro, Polytopia, and Unciv. Some of them do have mtx but its not ergerious and is more like dlc and others are paid whilst some are free with ads
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Only 20% of PlayStation users report themselves as being under 18.
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I’ve been a daily player of Angry Brids 2 for two and a half years. I started playing it when it came out, and picked it back up during the pandemic. I haven’t spent any money on it in more than a year, but before that I spent a little more than $20.
If you spend money in the game, you get stamps with which you can collect bonus rewards. It lists what rewards you get all the way up to 9.6 million stamps. You can spend $100 and get 1,500 stamps. That is 15 stamps per dollar. Rovio actually lists what reward a single person can get by spending $640,000 on this game.
$640,000.
If you spend money in the game, you get stamps with which you can collect bonus rewards. It lists what rewards you get all the way up to 9.6 million stamps. You can spend $100 and get 1,500 stamps. That is 15 stamps per dollar. Rovio actually lists what reward a single person can get by spending $640,000 on this game.
$640,000.
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My understanding is that most of the $9 million / month FTP income comes from a few whales, who themselves are more likely to pay for the paid version.
Hence removing a paid version that takes 5% of your monthly downloads may boost your FTP monthly income by as much as 10% or more.
Even if that doesn’t work out, a 5% boost on $9millon / month (assuming that all incoming ‘would have paid’ players move over to the FTP version) is still a stunnningly good return.
It’s converting a $30,000 monthly income stream into a $450,000 monthly income stream. That’s a new $5 million a year in pure profit. Plus the benefits from simplifying their product stack, removing complexity and freeing up staff time.
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They know that a pay-to-win title gives them on average $x/month income, they probably also know the time people spend playing the pay-to-play titles, and have decided that they make more money with pay-to-win games.
Maybe true, maybe not true due to different gameplay with pay-to-win (more grind required) and two kinds of games attract different kinds of players. Most pay-to-win profit is from relatively few people who have more money than sense or are addicted in a similar way to gamblers.
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caution live frogs
Ars Praetorian
I occasionally remember that I have a host of Angry Birds titles on my phone/tablet, but haven’t played any of them in a very long time. Part of that was the repetitive nature of the games, each iteration isn’t that much different than the rest. Part of it is also the creeping annoyances from upselling everything. As a game completist it‘s playing off the urge to always have the high score, to get all the stars, to find all the secrets in a given level in whatever game I play. But - I don’t want to cheat to do that. A huge part of the fun in a game (to me anyway) is the discovery aspect. How do I finish this tricky level? How do I sneak past this specific enemy? Where do I find the hidden button?
Angry Birds ruined this for me, because the game devs took the same approach that other game companies have done - having a hard time in this level? Had to play it more than once? Great, then let’s interrupt your game play with an offer to buy a cheat! Angry Birds annoyed me by making the cheat non-optional. Here’s a can of sardines, you now must use it to summon the Eagle to cheat on this level. Which means I have to hate-finish it, then replay it to try and legitimately beat it. Except now I’m being bombarded with ads saying “wasn’t that Eagle great? Don’t you want to buy another can of sardines?”
I guess at this point the only reason I haven’t deleted the apps is that they might be the least-annoying versions now available. But… they annoyed me so much that I haven’t opened them in literally years. Tell me how driving away users is good for your bottom line?
Angry Birds ruined this for me, because the game devs took the same approach that other game companies have done - having a hard time in this level? Had to play it more than once? Great, then let’s interrupt your game play with an offer to buy a cheat! Angry Birds annoyed me by making the cheat non-optional. Here’s a can of sardines, you now must use it to summon the Eagle to cheat on this level. Which means I have to hate-finish it, then replay it to try and legitimately beat it. Except now I’m being bombarded with ads saying “wasn’t that Eagle great? Don’t you want to buy another can of sardines?”
I guess at this point the only reason I haven’t deleted the apps is that they might be the least-annoying versions now available. But… they annoyed me so much that I haven’t opened them in literally years. Tell me how driving away users is good for your bottom line?
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As a developer, it pains me to say that this is why companies can lay of double digit percentages of their engineering teams. Developers don't know how to or aren't incentivized to finish a product so that it doesn't need perpetual R&D spend. Usually it's a matter of having good development practices followed by knowing when to put your pencils down.
A legacy title doesn't need a dev team because it doesn't need new features. At worst it needs to consume security fixes to found issues and third party libraries, rotate certificates, and occasionally update places where it uses remote services that had deprecated APIs. Even a large code base can have that handled on a part time basis by one person.
If the development team did their job correctly in the first place - and we have no reason to believe Rovio didn't - they don't need a release team. They need a few minutes of a release person's time now and then to sanity check the results of the automated deployment pipeline.
If the development team did their job correctly in the first place, and they're only making maintenance updates to the codebase, the test automation should do the vast majority of the testing. There shouldn't be a need for a full time manual tester, much less a team.
Many of us, as developers, tend to make things more work than they need to be. Updating things that don't need to be updated. Adopting tools that do more than we needed them to. Selecting shiny new technologies that haven't matured so that we're constantly chasing a moving target. Meanwhile there is plenty of software that is done. Finished. And has been for decades. Still available for sale, fully supportable and earning revenue. Without any ongoing development costs whatsoever.
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I have to disagree with you there. What if a major change breaks a well designed and programmed app? For example, the iPhone X added a notch to the phone, forcing user interface changes. The iPhone 14 Pro replaced the notch with a Dynamic Island, forcing user interface changes again. Even if the app is developed right, form factor changes sometimes screw up apps, forcing developers to develop new versions of the app to work around or embrace form factor and user interface changes.
One example is the iPhone version of Papers, Please. The Dynamic Island forced the scoreboard in the endless modes of that game to be redesigned since the Dynamic Island obscured the scoreboard.
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Funnily enough, the app has also been named Red's First Flight on Android, too - but it's also been delisted. But if you bought it have it installed, then go to App Settings and tap on the Google Play link, it will take you to the page called Red's First Flight.
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I mean, this perfectly makes sense. One's a game, the other's a gambling machine.
Until the governments outlaw it, the gambling machines are of course always going to be more profitable than games.
Until the governments outlaw it, the gambling machines are of course always going to be more profitable than games.
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Mobile phones being swamped by Free to Play games, was literally the reason I ended up buying a switch, my first nintendo console since the N64. I haven't looked back. Free to play games just highlights some of humanities worst traits. We'll happily download something because its free but ignore the fact that many people spend more per month than the $10-20 they could have charged upfront. I'd much rather a demo and pay to upgrade to the full version than the free to play model. Thankfully that model seems to not have gained much traction outside of things like Fortnight on consoles and computers.
Also the quality drops dramatically as well with new content in these free to play games, once its reach peak profit.
Also the quality drops dramatically as well with new content in these free to play games, once its reach peak profit.
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