Introduction
Angry Birds is now completely and utterly irrelevant. If you could travel back in time and tell someone in the early 2010s this fact, they simply wouldn't have believed you. That's because a decade ago, Angry Birds was more than just the number one mobile game series of all time. Angry Birds was a true media empire: games, toys, movies, and more. The franchise was bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, and analysts were projecting Angry Birds to be a global brand similar to that of Pokémon or Hello Kitty. The iconic red bird seemed unstoppable. But now, the name Angry Birds is nothing but a distant memory. The brand has rapidly faded into irrelevance and is now a forgotten relic of the internet's past.
Success Story
Everybody was rooting for Angry Birds in their studio, thanks to the team having such an unbelievably inspiring story. The year was 2003. Three students at Helsinki University in Finland decided to join a mobile game development contest. Despite stiff competition, they were 3-1 thanks to a game they created and later sold called King of the Cabbage World. This was a pivotal moment for the three young students. They realized that their burning passion for creativity and gaming could lead to a seriously lucrative career. That's when they decided to go all-in on a mobile game company, which they named Reboot.
After less than a year in operation, the three decided to change the name of their company to Rovio, the Finnish word for bonfire. It made sense; they all shared a burning passion for creativity. The following years were brutally difficult for the company. Remember, this was all before the advent of the smartphone that we know today. Their bet on mobile gaming was a wild idea. This early resulted in the company making a whopping 51 games that all flopped. None of the games they created were merely selling or had gained any serious traction at all.
By 2009, the team was in a dire financial situation, at risk of folding completely. But suddenly, a light bulb went off. They had an idea for their 52nd game, Angry Birds. They loved the concept of birds that had no legs, so their only way of launching forward was with a slingshot. Best of all, the iPhone's touchscreen allowed for an engaging launching mechanic, as well as trajectory lines. The team launched their 52nd title with Angry Birds, and well, it didn't immediately take off. But six months later, the momentum and hype had built to the point where Angry Birds was at the number one spot on the App Store charts. At this time, most apps that hit number one had a good two-week run of glory and then fell into obscurity. But not Angry Birds, which stayed at the top for 275 days. The game exceeded expectations for the team. In no time, quickly became their first and only profitable and popular title globally.
People were talking about Angry Birds practically overnight. Children, moms, and grandmas were all playing this simple yet addictive game. It didn't just take the US by storm; oh no, it took the entire world by storm. As the upward trajectory continued, Angry Birds became more than a game; it was a true cultural phenomenon. There wasn't a single individual, young or old, who wasn't aware of the game or who couldn't immediately recognize one of the characters. Merchandise was flying off of the shelves. Suddenly, every kid was sporting Angry Birds apparel and begging their parents for the plushies. The once-mobile game snowballed into a franchise of the small Finnish company never could have dreamed of.
Angry Birds was the coolest and most relevant brand for many, outright defining the early 2010s. The team knew that they had more than a game; they had an empire. Immediately, they set their sights on growing Angry Birds into a brand similar to that of Disney or Pokémon. They knew they had to build on their momentum and build on it quickly. The company changed its name to Rovio Entertainment, better reflecting its new direction. No longer just game development, they needed to focus on building a global brand. They needed to build an Angry Birds universe.
It took Angry Birds three years from 2009 to 2012 to hit 1 billion downloads. In 2014, just two years later, Angry Birds hit 2 billion downloads. All the while, Rovio was creating more Angry Birds games that built off the initial concept. If you had access to a phone in the early 2010s, you'd know the titles: Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Friends, Angry Birds Space, and Star Wars, it just kept going. The game was growing in popularity, and the brand was expanding. The global popularity was so massive that they even built a theme park in Central China. Hello, Kitty was a nine-billion-dollar business. Why couldn't Angry Birds be the same?
The founders leaned all in. Needless to say, the brand had become a cash cow, the likes of which had never been seen for a mobile game. In 2012, they had made 195 million dollars in revenue, and a staggering 50% of their revenue was coming from merchandise. It seemed like it was all going up, that they were becoming the unstoppable brand that everyone expected them to be. But there was a lot more going on below the surface. Cracks were forming, which eventually led to the downfall of the unstoppable brand.
While the Angry Birds craze was taking over the globe, a less hopeful picture was emerging. A company that was so focused on milking a franchise that they forgot what made them popular in the first place: good games. For example, in 2012, during the peak of Angry Birds fever, Rovio released a new game, The Amazing Alex. It was a mobile game focused on puzzles and physics, a concept that was not too dissimilar to Angry Birds. The game failed to gain any noteworthy success. There's a reason that you never heard of it. This was indicative of the company's true success potential.
Game number 52, Angry Birds, was the smash hit of all smash hits. But game number 53, was a boring, uninspiring failure, just like games number one through 51 that the company had released. Were they a team of experts who finally cracked the code for making the perfect game and franchise? Or were they a team that got exceptionally lucky with just one game? Well, Angry Birds kept releasing more games, and each game seemed increasingly less original, less creative, and less adored than the one prior. For example, the team released Angry Birds Transformers, which was a bizarre side-scroller game that begged for microtransactions every step of the way. Expectedly, the game was shunned by critics and fans alike, failing to make any meaningful returns. A similar story can be said for Angry Birds Fight, which was a clear rip-off of Candy Crush but with Angry Birds characters. In addition, the same can be said for Angry Birds Go, which was a lackluster Mario Kart rip-off. Games were getting worse, and the fans were getting increasingly bored.
It became clear to the fans of the franchise that fun, unique, creative games were no longer the priority of Rovio. Instead, there was one clear focus for the company: hoping to IPO, and pump out as many gaming titles that had the name Angry Birds attached to it, all to milk more money through sales and merchandising. The company quickly found itself in a bad place after the new titles were underwhelmed and underperformed. In 2014, Rovio laid off 110 employees, which was around 15% of their workforce. The boring titles and failure to properly evolve with the ever-changing internet led the once-cool brand to become rapidly uncool. This dramatically impacted merchandise sales as well, which was the most devastating for the company.
By the mid-2010s, Rovio was in a bad place. They had put all of their proverbial and digital eggs in one basket. Angry Birds, even with funded studios that were solely responsible for creating brand new original concepts, absolutely nothing gained momentum. The team had struck gold with Angry Birds, a phenomenon they were unable to replicate. The only strategy they could rely on was milking the brand for absolutely everything it was worth, hoping that miraculously they'd regain a fan base. To no one's surprise, this failed. By the mid-2010s, the relevance of Angry Birds was a mere fraction of what it was just a few years prior. From 2014 to 2015, merchandise sales had fallen by 43%. Rovio had to fire an additional 260 employees.
A brand that revolves around a mobile game will only be cool, quirky, and unique for so long. To sustain success, you have to build new success. Disney didn't just try to coast off Mickey Mouse's successful debut for 80 years, building nothing praiseworthy in the time between. No, Disney built an empire by having Mickey Mouse in multiple unique original titles that were all widely beloved. At the same time, they were building multiple other entities through the overarching brand. This is a strategy that Rovio was unable to execute. Instead, they only had one strategy to rely on: have a splash hit with a 2009 mobile game, then try to coast off its popularity for as long as you can. This is a strategy that simply can't last more than a few years, which is what we saw with Angry Birds.
By 2015, the impact and brand power of Angry Birds was all but dead. The thought of wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt or owning an Angry Bird's plushie was no longer the exciting and novel concept it was in 2010. As the company was tanking, it did receive its saving grace in 2016: The Angry Birds movie. Thanks to the animated movie's appeal for kids as well as a star-studded cast with faces like Bill Hader and Danny McBride, the movie did quite well, earning 352 million dollars against a 73 million dollar budget. The second movie, however, released in 2019, earned 152 million less than half of what the first movie made.
Also, in 2019, the company potentially put the nail in the coffin of any hope for regaining success when it made one of the biggest possible mistakes, which dramatically put off the few remaining loyal fans of the franchise. They had removed the old Angry Birds games from mobile phones without any warning. This means that if you had an Angry Birds game on an older device, suddenly one day you were completely unable to play it. It's not a surprise why they did this; the company was in shambles, only barely hanging on to a small bump in popularity thanks to a successful first movie. Now their only hope towards profitability was pushing fans to their newer, more lucrative games rife with microtransactions. This was just one more misstep from a company that had failed to do anything right by their fan base.
After intense backlash from the now-small Angry Birds community, they released an apology: "Dear fans, the old Angry Birds games are some of the most loved, downloaded, and known games in the world. We know we're so proud to have made them, and we are overwhelmingly happy that they've meant so much to you. But then we took them out of circulation and didn't say anything, and that let you down. Not cool. We promise our heart was in the right place; we wanted to focus on building new and even better games to serve our players in the best possible way going forward."
Conclusion
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