in the realm of mobile gaming there's no series quite as iconic as Angry Birds after being released in late 2009 the series would go on to have 3 billion total downloads two movies several spin-offs and a lot of merchandise the level of success this game about Birds and pigs led to is so immaculate that I can't even put it into words but I'll try to show it as a visual the last time I did a what killed video it was with my favorite Tower Defense series Plants vs Zombies here's the Google Trends graph for PvZ
and here's Angry Birds also just for fun let's put me here too but unlike the story of Plants vs Zombies where the series suffered from an overall decline caused by stale releases and simply how popular it was before the Angry Birds series was largely killed with one bad decision that being the games being pulled directly from the App Store at least that's what most people believe but the series actually had a pretty significant decline before that in this video I'm gonna go go through the history and see the series of events that led to the
downfall of one of mobile Gaming's biggest icons in 2003 three Finnish University students I'm not pronouncing these entered a mobile game development competition at an event called the assembly demo party they basically partook in an early 2000s version of a game jam and they made this game called King of the Cabbage World they ended up winning the whole event and this led to them starting a gaming company called reload the game itself ended up getting sold to a company called sumiya and being renamed to mule war two years passed and reload finally got its first
round of investment and the company was renamed to Rovio mobile they worked really hard to release a lot of games but nothing quite worked out that is until 2009 when in December of that year they'd released their magnum opus the very first Angry Birds game it may have taken 6 years and 52 games but they finally did it Angry Birds was the most popular game of its time and like its contemporaries it follows a simple gameplay loop with a lot of replayability basically you have some birds and you use them to break buildings to kill
pigs the uniqueness in the levels comes from the different abilities each bird possesses just as a quick refresher red is boring and has no special ability Chuck is faster than red but slightly weaker the blues are much weaker but can split into three and completely destroy more spread out damage on weaker structures bomb explodes Matilda lays an egg and the Egg explodes Terence is fat and how is a boomerang that does Boomerang things together they form the backbone that the level design could build off of as each bird works best against certain materials but the
gameplay Loop wasn't exactly their original idea the gameplay concept for Angry Birds was taken from a flash game made that same year by the name of Crush the Castle they share the same basic mechanics where you have to referral projectiles at an enemy base to kill enemies but the slingshot Works differently than the treview and in Angry Birds you have several different birds each with unique abilities not to mention the more distinct Variety in enemies and base materials All Things Considered I wouldn't call Angry Birds a rip-off but it was at least heavily inspired with
Rovio finally securing a hit they decided to take the obvious route and milk the Angry Bird series for all its work by 2011 they'd already planned out the movie and from 2010 to 2013 eight different Angry Birds games were released including some of the most iconic games in the series like Seasons Rio space Star Wars and bad piggies a game that focused on the titular antagonists and has you creating these egg stealing Contraptions and they also decided to become a video game publisher rather than making the games themselves but the biggest thing they did when
it came to profits was merchandise when you make a game that revolves around little cartoon birds attacking little cartoon pigs it's only a matter of time until people want to buy said characters in 2013 Rovio made 213 million dollars and roughly half of that income came from merchandise sales and Licensing literally everyone owned at least one plushie even I still have a few lying around the next year was where things started to stagnate a bit this year gave rise to a lot of new up-and-coming mobile games and the Angry Birds series is now five years
old but Rovio still had some tricks up their sleeve to avoid falling out of relevance they decided to take more risks with the series and started to Branch out in late 2013 they released Angry Birds Go a racing game that's completely different from the usual Angry Birds formula and while that game didn't do quite as well as expected they decided to try to completely flip the script of the series with Angry Birds Epic this is where I'd say the series peaked maybe not from a cultural relevance perspective but just with the scope and quality of
the game while the older games focused on the simple arcady nature of the gameplay Loop Angry Birds Epic is a turn-based RPG that uses the Angry Birds characters to create a fun atmosphere developed by Chimera entertainment and published by Rovio this game is a fun addition to the series but also uses the art style from Angry Birds tombs a TV series that ran on teletune from 2013 to 2016. the different weapons characters and items add a fun layer of strategy not to mention the music in this game genuinely sounds great unfortunately though Angry Birds Epic
wasn't as big of a success as Rovio had hoped for and 110 people were laid off as a result of low profits from their recent Endeavors those two games still got a ton of downloads but I guess they just weren't too profitable by the end of the year Rovio profits were down 73 percent which caused them to lay off another 260 employees the next year then they chose to get back to basics with Angry Birds too ignoring the fact that this isn't the second Angry Birds game Angry Birds 2 was a solid continuation of the
original their new level gimmicks and the art style was modernized all the while keeping the same general gameplay as the first but that year they'd also go more far out than ever after seeing those like bubble shooting games on Facebook Rovio realized that they were incredibly profitable so they made a spin-off called Angry Birds pop this game has you shooting colored balls to remove other colored balls on its own it's just a mediocre puzzle shooter with an Angry Bird skin but what's more interesting to see is that this is the direction where Rovio will soon
be heading in 2016 The Angry Birds movie was released critically it wasn't insanely well received as it seems like just another generic video game movie but it did well financially making 352 million at the box office those are some pretty big numbers so it was only a matter of time until a second movie would be made that same year they released two more games some pinball-like game Angry Birds Evolution which used the designs from the movie and Angry Birds blast it's a match 3 game yep they saw candy crush and just went we can do
that and they did in fact do that we got a few more uninspired games in 2019 but we also got the second Angry Birds movie I'd say it was a pointless cash grab that only reinforced my belief that Rovia is now solely in it for the money but this movie was actually surprisingly decent and it feels a lot more inspired than the first film being a solid Take On The Heist movie format now we finally have their most recent blunder around mid-2019 Rovio had internally decided to stop updating their older Angry Birds titles all of
their older games were then removed without warning after it finally started gaining attention the next year they released the statement saying they just stopped updating the older Angry Birds games due to them wanting to focus on newer games rather than just performing maintenance on older titles this sounds fair enough but that means that the older Angry Birds games would no longer be compatible on the newest devices while I can definitely sympathize with Rovio as it can be annoying to be solely known for something you've done so long ago allowing the game aims to become unavailable
isn't something they should have even considered from an outsider's perspective it just appears that Rovio was purposely removing the older games to force people to play their newer arguably worse game and limiting someone's options isn't something to be taken lightly halfway through 2021 Rovio put out another more revised statement providing some reasons why the games were taken out of circulation saying they wanted to focus on making newer and better games rather than updating games on an outdated engine van did it off by saying they'll work on bringing some of the classic Angry Birds games back
and on the last day of March 2022 they re-released Angry Birds Classic this is a remake of the original game and while it's a faithful remake we're still missing many of the older Angry Birds sequels like space season Star Wars or epic the only one of these games to get re-listed was bad piggies which is pretty cool but like give us the other ones currently rovio's in some pretty hot Waters not only with the fan base but also with the law oh yeah so as it turns out they were collecting the data of underage children
whoopsie so what killed Angry Birds besides the deletion of their older games I think the biggest aspect of the decline was the shift from making original games to instead focus on their newer and honestly less inspired games I'm not saying the series was super original before but the creativity really took a hit after the release of Angry Birds Epic and Rovia weren't even the ones that made that game there's actually a lot of similarities I found between the story of Rovio and PopCap the company behind Plants vs Zombies a game that released that same year
they both got massively popular off of one game and had to do whatever they could to keep it afloat I think the biggest difference between the two is that popcaps sold out to EA before the beginning of the decline while Rovio tried to do everything on their own and because of this they ended up biting off more than they could chew having to close several divisions and have a lot of layoffs due to the underperforming of their recent titles before the buyout the scope of podcast games hadn't ever increased but with Rovio after the first
wave of success they immediately began to work on massive projects like several grander spin-offs and the two feature films I believe the biggest issue was that like anything that gets super popular Angry Birds was always just a fad and instead of branching out into other things early on Rovio just kept making Angry Birds games they put all their eggs in one nest and after a while the pigs were there to steal them
