Rovio gives fans the bird | This Week in Business
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.
Rovio delisted the original Angry Birds mobile app in 2019 and pulled a number of its old games from app stores without warning, much to the chagrin of long-time fans.
Two years later, it acknowledged that move was "not cool" in an open letter to its fans, saying its "heart was in the right place" and pledging to make amends.
QUOTE | "We hear you. There's a big outcry for getting back some of the older fan favourites (Angry Birds Classic, Angry Birds Seasons etc). We also want to say: We are working on it! We will find a way to bring these classic experiences back to you." – Rovio, in its letter to fans.
Just a month after that letter, Rovio was laying on the "all about the fans" line even thicker.
QUOTE | "What we take extremely seriously - and I think you're seeing the beginning of this in how we engage with our community - is fandom really matters to us. Engaging with that fandom really matters to us, and we haven't always done a great job with it, and it's something we want to do better." - Angry Birds head of brand strategy Ben Mattes laid out the plan for us in July of 2021.
As is often the case with large publisher strategies, Rovio did a reasonable job backing up its statements in the short term, and a less reasonable job sticking behind them for the long haul.
The company had just released the ad-free, microtransaction-free throwback Angry Birds Reloaded exclusively into Apple Arcade when it published that letter to fans, and it started the line of more
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