Rovio, the company behind the once-beloved Angry Birds series, is wholly responsible for the franchise’s decline in popularity and their current negative reputation.
When the original Angry Birds was released for the iPhone in 2009, it didn’t take long for the game to become a sensation. Its repetitive yet addictive gameplay, in which the player fires flightless birds from a slingshot into buildings constructed by egg-snatching piggies, was a perfect fit for smartphones.
Unlike console games, which often require sit-down sessions of dedicated gaming, Angry Birds’ massive variety of short levels meant smartphone users could play a level or two on their commute to work or between meetings in the office, and then resume their gaming later. There was no need to dedicate hours at a time; the game was designed in a manner that made it easy to pick up and play for short bursts at any time of the day.
The game became a smash hit and continued to grow as it became playable on Android products in 2010. The game spawned several sequels, some of which were tie-ins with major franchises, most notably two games that were crossovers with Star Wars. The original game received consistent content updates throughout its lifetime that added sets of new levels, and in 2016, the franchise got its first theatrically released movie.
Despite Rovio’s quick rise to popularity, it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the company. Prior to the release of Angry Birds, Rovio had created 51 games, but none of them took off like the company had hoped.
By 2009, the Finnish company was in a state of bankruptcy, and they continued to search for new concepts for games. Senior game developer Jaakko Iisalo presented the team with a screenshot featuring some angry-looking wingless birds, and the company decided to make a game based on the characters. Physics games such as Crush the Castle were popular at the time, so the company decided to try their hand at the genre.
Despite the game’s imminent success, Rovio was certainly not a big game company by any stretch. It was founded in 2003 by students who had won a video game-making competition, and when they were on the verge of bankruptcy in 2009, they only had 12 employees. Angry Birds was seemingly just another attempt at keeping the company afloat, and its monumental success was truly unprecedented within the fledgling mobile game industry. The game struggled to make waves at first, but after becoming a featured app on the UK App Store in early 2010, its popularity rapidly accelerated.
Besides the game’s pick-up-and-play nature and addictive gameplay, the developers’ passion for their work contributed greatly to the title’s success. The birds’ hand-drawn art style is unique and memorable, and the game’s consistent stream of updates showed care and maintained interest in the series.
This wasn’t a game developed by some gigantic soulless corporation like much of the garbage that pollutes App Stores today. This was a game developed by a small and passionate team, and their love for game development was made clear through the game’s experience.
Unfortunately, once large sums of money came into the picture, the same corporate trash that spits out dreadful mobile game ads today would eventually infect Rovio.
The first few years of the Angry Birds franchise were incredible with new games and consistent updates across the series’ lineup, but by 2014, cracks were starting to show.
Two of the three Angry Birds games released in 2014 strangely deviated from the series’ slingshot gameplay. Angry Birds Epic was a role-playing game (RPG) featuring the series’ characters, and Angry Birds Transformers was another franchise tie-in, but this time, the gameplay loop was completely different from the series’ roots.
Both of these games focused on Angry Birds characters, but neither of them upheld the gameplay that flung the series into popularity. Some of these concepts could have been good for Rovio and diversified the game series’ lineup, but unfortunately these new ideas became the main focus and essentially replaced the slingshot games altogether.
In the following years, Rovio – a company that was growing in size and had moved away from its independent-feeling roots – seemed more interested in developing short-term games at a fast pace, experimenting with new genres but always coating it with Angry Birds-coloured paint.
While the original game received a direct sequel in 2015, that would be one of the company’s final ventures into the original slingshot-slinging gameplay. Over the next few years, Rovio pumped out Angry Birds-branded match-3 games, a pinball game, another RPG, balloon-popping titles and a VR (virtual reality) game. Some might call this innovation, but really it felt more like the company was throwing every idea they had at the wall, slapping an Angry Birds logo on it, and shoving it full of ads and microtransactions.
Even the original game, which was originally on the App Store at a one-time price of $0.99 with no ads or microtransactions, was changed to a free game with all of the problems plaguing the mobile game industry today.
It doesn’t help that many of the company’s new Angry Birds titles were continually delisted from App Stores, further making it feel like Rovio was pumping out low-quality shovelware in a desperate attempt to see what was most profitable.
The Angry Birds Movie and its 2019 sequel were perhaps the most glaringly obvious examples of the franchise’s commercialization, with the original iconic 2D bird designs being replaced with bland, lifeless 3D models that were now humanoid with wings and legs.
It was clear the series had lost its identity due to Rovio’s newfound corporate money-making mindset, but things only got worse from there.
Soon, the original Angry Birds games – all the ones that made the series popular in the first place, and the only ones that most fans still cared about – no longer received content updates and were eventually removed from App Stores entirely. Rovio’s removal of the original titles is a strange erasure of the series’ history and spits on the legacy of the franchise responsible for their financial success.
Adding insult to injury, Rovio started producing the same mindless ads to promote their dreadful new titles that we see from the mobile game companies that are often meme-d online.
This once soulful, joyous company had become yet another bland corporation as they focused on growth and money and forgot about the passion that gave them a name in the first place. By this point, many of the original team members behind Angry Birds were gone from the company and were seemingly replaced with a bunch of greedy corporate businessmen who thought they could slap an Angry Birds logo on anything and make it sell.
Fans of the franchise’s earlier games who were upset about the series’ downfall began rallying online in an attempt to persuade Rovio to return to the series’ roots.
Through the hashtag #BringBack2012, fans expressed their discontent with Rovio’s new strategy and demanded a return to the Angry Birds they had grown up with.
Against all odds, Rovio actually listened. In June 2021, the company announced that they had heard the players’ concerns and would be building a complete recreation of the original Angry Birds game, and it would feature all of the levels that were released up until 2012. Sure enough, on March 31, 2022, Rovio released Rovio Classics: Angry Birds onto App Stores.
Like the original game, the app was $0.99 USD and featured no ads or microtransactions. It stayed true to its mission and was a nearly exact recreation of the original game that featured identical assets and sound design. It was exactly what fans had hoped for, and it quickly shot to the top of store charts and consistently sold well – something that new Angry Birds titles hadn’t experienced for years. Angry Birds was back.
Yet, as they say: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Fans were shocked by an announcement from Rovio in February 2023, which announced that the remake would be delisted from the Google Play Store and renamed to “Red’s First Flight” on the Apple App Store.
In the announcement, Rovio cited the game’s “impact on [their] wider games portfolio” and asked fans to “continue to bring that passion” to their new original Angry Birds titles.
It’s not hard to see what this really means: the game sold so well that it cannibalised Rovio’s microtransaction-riddled garbage, and they needed to make it unplayable on Android (and purposefully make it harder to find on iOS) so that players would go back to their new games.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Rovio wasn’t just disinterested in the original games; they were now actively trying to eliminate their classic content’s presence so they could continue to line their pockets. Many companies might have seen this clear demand for original-style content as an opportunity to continue returning to the series’ roots, but Rovio is more interested in distancing themselves from their fans’ desires.
Rovio has made it abundantly clear that their fans do not matter to them in the slightest. What’s important here is financial gain and nothing else. Any semblance of soul the company once had has been destroyed in the name of capitalistic greed. What was once a company led by innovative and passionate game designers is now another profit-driven, soulless and societally worthless entity.
There’s a reason why Rovio has such an abysmal reputation online in modern day, and they deserve every bit of negative attention that they receive. Rovio is a prime example of the effects of greed and is the perfect representation of the way consumerism can destroy things that were once cherished.