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.
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.
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.
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.