If you can’t beat them, join them. Angry Birds remains one of the most popular mobile game series in the world, but its financial success has been dwarfed by that of match-three puzzle games like Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons.
Developer Rovio has clearly noticed: it has soft-launched two new Angry Birds games that ditch its familiar bird-slinging gameplay for... match-three puzzling.
Angry Birds Stella Pop! has been released in Canada, while Angry Birds Fight! is available in Thailand. Single-country debuts have become the standard way for mobile publishers to test and refine new games before giving them a global release.
First reported on by fan-site Angry Birds Nest , the new games are both “freemium” titles: free to download, and making their money from in-app purchases of virtual items.
Angry Birds Stella Pop! is a bubble-popping game in the same vein as console classic Bust-a-Move (also known as Puzzle Bobble), or perhaps more relevantly, the Bubble Witch Saga game that’s been a hit on mobile for Candy Crush publisher King.
Angry Birds Fight! involves matching lines of three or more birds to battle enemies, taking its inspiration from Puzzle & Dragons, which has been a lucrative success for its publisher, Japanese firm GungHo Online.
The two games are the latest efforts by Rovio to build on the popularity of the Angry Birds games, which at its peak in late 2012 had 263 million monthly active players. By September 2014, that had shrunk to 200 million - still one of the biggest mobile franchises - with Rovio announcing the following month that it was laying off 16 per cent of its staff after making “assumptions of faster growth than have materialised”.
In 2013, Rovio’s revenues increased slightly to 156 million euros, but its annual profits halved to 26.9 million euros as the company invested heavily in its ToonsTV animation network and the first Angry Birds film, which will not be released until 2016.
By contrast, King reported revenues of $1.9 billion for that year on the back of Candy Crush’s success, and proceeded to go public in an IPO valuing the company at more than $7 billion.
Meanwhile, GungHo is estimated to have made more than $1.4 billion from Puzzle & Dragons alone that year. Rovio has already switched to a freemium model for newer Angry Birds games in new genres, including racing game Angry Birds Go!, roleplaying game Angry Birds Epic, and branded action title Angry Birds Transformers.
Those games have yet to deliver a Candy Crush-sized hit, but by emulating that game more closely, Rovio’s strategy of spreading Angry Birds’ eggs among multiple baskets will continue looking for a financial reward to match the popularity of its characters.
